Gathering Darkness
by Obsidian Productions
Summary: When a battle-hardened squad of ODSTs drops into a forest one rainy night under false pretenses, they find themselves facing down a seemingly impossible entity, far deadlier than any they have ever encountered before...(HaloxSlenderman)
1. Chapter 01: Winter's Edge

**PART ONE  
** – _DARK WAS THE NIGHT-_

* * *

He awoke to darkness, mired in terrified confusion.

" _Did you get that Kane? Are you there?"_

Ashton Kane blinked several times, staring into the abyssal gloom that seemed to enshroud him. He rubbed at his eyes, trying to piece together his current reality. He was in a bed, beneath blankets, there was a soft blue glow in the room. He focused, seeing the uncertain outline of furniture: a desk, a chair, a small table.

Instinct, tempered by years of military training, came down like a hammer. He reached up and groped for the reply button on the comms console embedded in the wall near his bed. Beside him, he felt someone stir.

"Negative. Say again, Sergeant," he replied, his voice hoarse. He cleared his throat.

" _I said I need you in Briefing Two in ten minutes. Something's come up."_

The Sergeant's tone, cautious and wary, sent warning signals pulsing through his already keyed-up body. "Affirmative, Sergeant. I'll be there."

" _Good. Going to need to be sharp for this one."_

The call was cut and there was just the soft hum of an open channel. Kane killed it.

"That didn't sound good."

He glanced over and saw Lara rubbing sleep from her eyes.

"No, it didn't," he murmured.

"You okay? You look a little freaked. I thought I heard you talking in your sleep."

"Um...nightmares," he replied. "I have them...I haven't really told anyone, but I can't really hide it from you anymore."

She reached up, laid a warm, soft hand against his bicep. "You don't have to," she said.

He wasn't sure what to say to that, so he just laid his hand over hers, gave it a gentle squeeze and then pulled the blankets back. Getting to his feet, moved across the starkly furnished room into the squalid bathroom. He flipped on the bright white light and screwed up his eyes. Placing his hands on the counter, he frowned as he studied himself in the mirror. He really looked like crap. When it wasn't insomnia, it was nightmares.

His eyes were bloodshot and a darkish shadow lay beneath each. He was paler than usual too, and usual was very when you spent a lot of time in space or sealed inside of a suit of power armor. He heard rustling and a few seconds later, Lara appeared behind him, her head over his right shoulder. She was really tall, almost the same height he was. One of the many things he liked about her. Her hands came up and laid against his shoulders. She hugged her bare breasts against his back. "You okay? It's not going to get weird now, is it?" she asked.

He chuckled softly and turned around. Leaning against the counter, he pulled her to him. "No, it'll be fine. It won't get weird," he replied.

Last night was their first time together. They were both in uncharted waters at the moment, but he felt confident that things were going to be...well, not fine, he had never been any good at relationships, but not immediately terrible. Lara was a good person, a great ODST, he trusted her. He just wasn't sure what she'd seen in him, or why she'd initiated the relationship last night. It was still coming as a surprise to him.

"We need to shower," she said, breaking the embrace reluctantly.

Kane nodded and studied her nude form briefly as she turned on the shower before turning back around and looking at himself once more. He studied his pale skin, his frame of rangy muscle. He knew that he was looking for wounds. It was stupid, a paranoid old habit of his, but he did it after particularly bad nightmares out of some kind of instinctual reaction. In the dream, he had been back on that cold metal slab, a sadistic Elite presiding over him with a plasma scalpel, calmly attempting to extract information from him.

Kane reached down and touched his stomach. There was no scar there, they'd fixed a lot of the damage, but he still remembered it all. The Elite had done surgery on him without anesthetic, pulling his appendix out.

Trying to push the thoughts away, he ran his hand over the dark stubble staining his jaw and head. Have to buzz it again soon, no time for that now, though.

"You coming?" Lara asked as she slipped into the shower.

"Yeah," he replied.

She didn't know. No one on the squad did. In the four months since he'd rotated in to replace a Corporal who had been killed during a mission, he hadn't found any reason to bring it up, though Sergeant Goll had probed gently about his experience when he noted it on his record. He'd relented quickly when Kane made it clear that it wasn't necessarily a thing he wanted to relieve in any real capacity.

He joined Lara in the shower and they quickly washed the sleep and sex away. He didn't know how to feel about last night. He felt good, to be sure. Lance Corporal Lara Hendrix was a stellar person. He'd picked up on that quickly. Initially, he'd been worried that she would resent him. The man he was replacing had been Goll's second in command, and technically Lara could have taken the job, but they'd opted to just do a direct replacement. Kane's record spoke for itself, but he still didn't like the politics of rank and file.

But Lara had no such ill will towards him.

As they finished washing off, he killed the water, then studied her as she dried off. She was a sniper, godlike with the weapon on the field, and spectacular with throwing knives. He'd seen her take down more than one Elite with a well-placed throw. She was tall and sparsely built, thin and wiry like him, though definitely thinner. She was only maybe an inch shorter than his six foot frame. Her skin was snow pale, like his, and she kept her short brunette hair usually pulled into a little function, no-nonsense ponytail.

Her brilliant blue eyes were what gave away her intelligence, her quickness. He'd initially mistaken them for implants, they seemed to glow.

And all of this was what fed his other feelings right now. Guilt. He felt guilty that she was with him, because surely there were better guys she could shack up with. ODSTs were supposed to be crazy, but Kane thought that if the war wasn't going so poorly and the UNSC wasn't so desperate for guys and girls with guns that were willing to fight and kill, he'd probably have been put out on a Section Eight a year ago.

But beggars couldn't be choosers.

He wasn't feeling sorry for himself, he just knew that he was bad at relationships. Though he was loyal, respectful and honest, he'd figured out that he was bad at opening up in any meaningful way. That's why most of his relationships were short or very casual. And he didn't want to do that to Lara. He genuinely liked her.

He and Lara had been cautiously flirting for almost three months now and she'd finally come to him last night, following him back to his quarters after a rough training session. They tended to train together in a variety of methods, and she was particularly good at hand-to-hand. She was damned quick and she'd taught him a few things.

When he'd realized she was lingering with him outside of his quarters, he'd asked why and she'd sprung the question on him.

Sighing, Kane put this out of his mind.

Although he did have a lingering question.

They were both getting dressed. She'd gone out after they'd made love the first time to grab a fresh uniform last night.

"Lara, um...we didn't really talk about, you know, what you're hoping this to be. I mean, like, was this a one-time thing or do you want to keep it casual?" he asked awkwardly, not looking at her as he laced up his boots.

This was ridiculous. He was twenty six with a decade in the military, the last three of those years in the ODSTs. He'd killed probably a thousand Covenant during his career and had faced down life or death situations a hundred times over. But he was crap when it came to social skills or anything personal.

"I like you," she replied simply. "I want to be your girlfriend, I want you to be my boyfriend. I want this to be exclusive and a bit serious."

That was another thing about her: she was blunt.

"Oh," he replied.

"Is that not what you were hoping for?" she asked.

"Oh, no. I mean, yeah. I mean," he sighed, "I mean yes, I'm happy with that. I...like you. Um, a lot," he replied.

Lara laughed. As they finished zipping up their black jumpsuits, she stepped up to him and kissed him briefly on the lips. "I like you too, Ash," she said. She was the only one he was on a first name basis with. "Now, let's get going before Goll decapitates us for being late."

She had a point. They began to head for the exit, but he stopped abruptly, patting at his pockets. He turned and stalked over to his nightstand. He opened the drawer and fished out a crumpled pack of Yeheyuan cigarettes and his battered silver Zippo, stamped with a raised emblem of a flaming skull. He fished a cig out, bit down on it and lit it up. Snapping the metal jaws of the Zippo shut, he placed both items in his pocket.

"Okay, _that_ is something we're going to argue about," she said.

"Aw come on, really?" he asked.

"Yes! They smell awful. Take up smoking weed, like I do."

"Weed smells like a freaking skunk, Lara."

"Yeah, but it's...an acquired smell."

He rolled his eyes as they headed out of the quarters, he almost walked into Private Thompson, the youngest member of the team, though only by one year next to Kane. Slim and average height, he faded easily into the background. He didn't have what those in space tended to call a spacer's tan, but only because he was black. He was their resident technician and Kane rarely saw the man. Where Kane was typically antisocial, Thompson was shy and awkward.

"Sorry, Kane," he mumbled, stepping aside.

"It's fine," Kane replied.

"I saw that, you two."

The three of them stared down the hallway and spotted their medic, PFC Huxley. He had an average build for an ODST and close-cropped blonde hair, but it was his eyes that might as well have been flashing a neon sign that said _Born Pissed Off_. The man was always looking for a fight. "You came out of his room," he said.

"Leave them alone, Hux," Private Diaz said, walking passed him. "Just cause you're not getting any doesn't mean none of us can."

"First of all, Diaz, I get some all the time. Second of all, that's easy for you to say because you've been riding Thompson," he shot back.

Diaz rolled her eyes. Short, Hispanic and tougher than most ODSTs he'd come across, their weapons expert faced every threat head on. In fact, it was kind of a problem. He'd seen her take some pretty stupid risks, much to Thompson's chagrin. He had always found their relationship a bit curious. They were so different in personality, but, well, Lara was apparently interested in him so...relationships were weird.

The group of ODSTs made their way down the brilliant lit corridors of the _Winter's Edge_. They'd been on patrol for the past month and it had been a boring four weeks. They'd just had one bit of action two weeks ago when a Covenant scouting party had been reported on a moon with a low population count. There'd been conflict with the local Marines and the _Winter's Edge_ had dropped in out of slipspace to render assistance. Kane and his seven person squad of ODSTs had dropped in and kicked ass for two solid days.

But other than that, this region of space had been quiet. Apparently, something else had come up. He puffed away nervously on his Yeheyuan as he navigated the too-bright corridors. Why was he nervous? Combat didn't really scare him anymore, just gave him a kind of machine-adrenaline. He tried to shrug it off, but couldn't easily do so. He'd honed his instincts, pared them down to tools of razor sharp survival over the past decade, and they were very rarely wrong. By the time they'd reached the briefing room, he'd killed about half his cig. While the others went inside, he paused and stubbed the cigarette out on the bottom of his boot.

Dropping the remainder of it into his pocket, he followed the others. A small room dominated by a metal table surrounded by swivel chairs awaited him. Their good Sergeant Goll was already there, presiding over the table at its head, scowling fiercely into a datapad. That was a bad sign. Goll was a twenty year man, the last ten of them in the ODSTs. He was a battle-hardened vet and looked every inch one, being six four and two sixty of solid muscle. He kept his head shaved and his eyes were a flat white. Kane had never gotten the straight story on what had happened, but there'd been a battle injury and he'd needed replacements.

Why he'd gone with white, Kane wasn't sure.

But as grizzled as the man was, Goll had a great game face. He kept morale high and inspired fierce loyalty in his troops.

When he scowled, there was a damned good, (or, strictly speaking bad,) reason for it.

The final member of their squad, PFC Ross, sat stoic and patient in his seat. He was a short Italian man made out of bulky muscle. Despite being their demolitions expert and looking like he should be as pissed as Hux normally was, Ross was a very reserved, calm man, and a very pleasant one. Off the field he was amiable and sociable, always good for a laugh or a story and a great drinking partner. Kane found himself, on the rare occasions he was actually feeling social, seeking Ross's company. He quickly settled into his seat.

As the others finished gathering, Goll finally dropped his datapad.

"All right, Helljumpers, we've got an assignment. The call just came in twenty minutes ago. From ONI."

That got Kane's attention. Normally their missions came through the UNSC. ONI very rarely handed them assignments.

"I've always been honest with you and I'm not going to stop, so...this assignment stinks of bullshit. Officially, we're being routed to a small edge world, a colony planet, named Darkholm. We're to take a Pelican down into the Blackmore Forest and recover the data core of a research satellite that went down yesterday."

"S…seriously?" Hux asked. "They woke us up in the middle of the night for this?"

"Yes. Believe me, I asked why local forces couldn't handle it, especially after I learned that it went down within a few miles of a Marine outpost, and they said this was a sensitive issue and we were the best, closest option." Goll looked down at the console built into the table in front of him. He punched in some commands and the lights dimmed. A holographic projector built into the center of the table flickered to life.

"Here is the Blackmore Forest. Points of interest include an abandoned UNSC bunker, a small UNSC Marine outpost, a failed mining operation, a quarry and a power station. ONI has told me that local forces are working on evacuating the local population, which should be relatively small. There's also a ranger station, some cabins and houses, a restaurant and a few other structures."

"Why is there an evacuation?" Kane asked.

"Again, I don't know. They won't give me any further intel, which is why this stinks. So we're going in heavy. We're going to be dropping into the region in about two hours, so I want you all sharp and ready. Study up on the region and be in Hangar Two in an hour and forty five minutes in full armor and armed. Questions?"

There were several, but none Goll could answer.

He looked around at them all, his white eyes touched with apprehension. Goll had to feel what Kane had earlier, the pang of worry.

Something was wrong with this mission.

"Dismissed," he said.


	2. Chapter 02: Darkholm

The armory smelled like gunmetal, sweat and anxiety.

After the briefing, Kane and Lara had gone to train for forty five minutes, then they'd headed back to his quarters for another, lengthier shower. And for another round of sex. That helped wake him up a bit more and make him feel better, though he still hadn't been able to completely shake the pervasive sense of dread. They'd grabbed breakfast after that in the mess. Kane hadn't been hungry but he knew he needed to eat, so he'd shoved the scrambled eggs, bacon and toast into his mouth and chewed with a kind of machine monotony.

He'd studied the intel while they ate.

There wasn't a great deal of it.

Now they were in the armory, and the adrenaline was coming back, that old pre-mission buzz and hype. But it was laced with something else now, shot through with red lines of anxiety and fear. He tried to shake it as he stalked across the room, his boots clanging dully on the deckplates. He noticed a distinct lack of bullshitting as the ODST squad hit their stations. The quiet was unnerving as lockers were popped open and jet black suits of polished armor were pulled on. Kane tried to let the familiar routine soothe him.

When it didn't work, he let his thoughts drift to Lara.

He still felt weird about the budding relationship. It had certainly gone slower than several of his others. Of course, it had the distinct advantage(?) of being an actual relationship, and not just a fling. Those were fun, but they'd slowly lost their appeal over the past few years. He'd gotten to know her slowly, almost cautiously, over the past few months and then they'd slept together instead of the other way around. Maybe that's what was giving him pause, he was more invested in her, something he'd been trying to push away from for awhile now.

He sighed and stared down at his helmet, this wasn't working, he couldn't seem to banish the dark thoughts, no matter what subject he focused on. Well, nothing new there. He could see his grim, pale, bruised-eye reflection in the helmet's silver visor, twisted and shadowed. He pulled his helmet on and secured it, then moved over to the weapons side of the armory. Polished steel and glass waited for his inspection.

Kane came to stand before a glass-topped case. He stared down into the niche beyond, at the weapons that had become so familiar to him they were extensions of himself. What to bring on a mission like this? Well, when in doubt, prepare for the worst. Popping open the case, he selected a silenced M6C and checked the sights on it. They seemed solid, so he loaded it up, flipped on the safety and slipped it into its holster on his hip. With that gun secure, he considered his primary weapon, and finally settled on a silenced M7 SMG.

Not his usual compliment, but something about this mission suggested stealth to him. He could be wrong, it was a less certain feeling, but either way, he knew he could defend himself well with this arsenal. He gathered a collection of magazines for both weapons, placing them and, after a moments' consideration, grabbed a pair of fragmentation grenades. Just in case he needed to go loud. Never knew when something like that came up.

He felt a shock of fear surge through him, lighting up every nerve ending at once, as his radio crackled to life.

Jeez, he was more tense than he realized.

" _Sergeant Goll, this is the bridge, we have a problem,"_ came the voice. It was unfamiliar, but then again, Kane hadn't familiarized himself with basically anyone beyond his team. He wasn't exactly a social creature.

Goll sighed. "What is it?"

" _There's some kind of interference over the drop zone."_

"What kind of interference?" Goll asked slowly.

" _Unknown. We've never seen anything like it and it doesn't match anything on file. We can't get communications through, nor can we scan the region. It covers almost all of the Blackmore Forest. We're currently attempting to contact the next nearest population center, to see if we can get a better idea of what's going on. As it stands, insertion via Pelican is too dangerous."_

"Great," Goll muttered. He was silent, surely considering the situation, weighing the pros and cons. "Prepare our drop pods and settle us into a geosynchronous orbit," he said finally. "Update ONI on the situation."

" _Affirmative."_

"All right, people, you heard him. Finish up and get to the pod bay."

With this pronouncement, he shut the weapons locker he'd been standing before with a loud click, turned and strode out of the room. Kane shared a glance with Lara. She didn't have her helmet on yet. Her normally smooth, at-ease features were tinged with worry. After a few seconds, she secured her helmet, hiding her worried eyes behind opaque silver glass. The squad finished gathering their things. Lockers were closed, cases secured, and they filed out of the armory. Kane worked to keep his thoughts blank as they navigated the overly-bright corridors of the _Winter's Edge_. He ached for another cigarette but kept it at bay.

The bulkheads, he saw, were scored with thousands of minute scratches from years of service. He didn't know how old the ship was, but he imagined a decade at least. From the outside, it had looked battered and scarred.

He knew how it felt.

They filed into the pod bay and Kane felt another familiar, almost comforting wave of adrenaline. Not enough to quash the mounting tension, but enough to ease it. Or, at the very least, distract him from it. He'd become intimately familiar with pod bays over the past several years. The drop pods themselves, the hallmark of the ODSTs, sat across the room in a grim line of dark metal and glass, human-sized bullets waiting to be launched from their dark titanium nests. He always lamented how they were one-and-dones, their use ended in a loud crunch as metal kissed earth. It seemed like such a waste.

Especially when the occupant died in the crash.

As the squad came into the room, that same silent air of mute desperation hanging over them like a bleak pall, Goll marched over to a console.

"Bridge, Goll here. What's the situation?"

" _We can't get in touch with anyone within a five mile radius of the forest, though the population itself is very sparse in the area. Scans around the forest confirm life signs, so it seems to be a comms problem. Still no signals or scans getting through the interference."_

"Show me," Goll said.

Kane joined him at the console, then his frown deepened as the screen flickered to life, showing a topographical map of their drop zone. There was a big, black seething mass occupying most of the screen, its edges uncertain, growing darker towards its core.

"How close is the nearest life sign?" he asked after a moment.

" _Just over a mile away."_

Goll grunted. "That's good at least, I suppose. Less chance of people in danger...though we have no idea how far the evacuation got or what kind of situation we might be looking at in the forest." He fell silent, staring at the screen. Finally he sighed. "Any word from ONI?"

" _Yes, Sergeant. They have been apprised of the situation and confirm that their orders remain unchanged."_

"Figured that...all right, mount up!" he called. "We're punching out. Remain in geosynchronous orbit and attempt to maintain contact."

" _Understood, Sergeant."_

Goll sighed and turned away from the screen. "Going to need to be sharp down there, Kane. No idea what we're walking into."

Kane nodded tightly. "I'll be ready," he replied.

"Good. Let's get to it," he said grimly.

They crossed the pod bay. Kane just caught sight of Lara slipping into her pod. The door snapped shut behind her. He suppressed a sigh and opened up the door to his own pod. He stuffed himself into the cramped interior, laying his back against the padding, then settled in. After strapping himself into the pod, he brought it online, maneuvering carefully in the cramped space. Kane waited, closing his eyes while he waited for the pod to do its thing. The ache for a cigarette was mounting. With a heavy sigh, he flipped up his visor and executed the complex series of maneuvers it took to get a cig in his mouth and lit.

He puffed on the Yeheyuan and felt himself calm a fraction.

Eyes still closed, he suddenly had a flash of blood spraying and beading on a titanium surface. It was a common enough sight in his line of work, but he could peg the memory immediately. Two years ago, an Elite cracking the skull of a technician he'd been friends with when the ship he'd been on had been engaged and boarded. He'd barely made it out of there alive. His mind had become a high-speed catalog for such gruesome memories.

The pod finished its routine systems and hull check, came back clean, and finished its warmup. Sighing, Kane took one final puff, then stubbed the cigarette out on the interior of the pod. Not like anyone would notice. As he dropped the quarter-dead cig into an unused pocket, the radio in his helmet crackled to life.

" _Punch it!"_ Goll called.

Kane punched it.

With an explosive jolt that kicked him in his guts and made his bones rattle, the drop pod was shot out into the dead space. It streaked towards the planet and quickly began to vibrate as it started sheering through the upper reaches of Darkholm's atmosphere. Kane tried again to clear his mind, closed his eyes as he often did during drops. It was a ritual, the arcane sorcery of a mind trying to face, contemplate and accept the idea that death could be milliseconds away with absolutely no warning. Such was the life of a pod-rider.

This time, when he closed his eyes, all he could see was the screen displaying the seething black mass of the interference.

It made him think of cancer.

Kane opened his eyes and stared through the window ahead of him. Flames were shrieking past it now. He was sweating. The temp inside the pod was probably up over a hundred already and would keep rising. Technically speaking, the rides were always short, but they sure didn't feel short. Those sixty to one hundred seconds he spent shooting down through an atmosphere always seem to stretch into bloated, awful segments of time, measured not by a clock but by the crooked, internal mechanisms of his own ailing mind.

There was no chatter over the radio, again an unusual occurrence, and the lack of humanity seemed somehow powerfully ominous, a heraldic portent of things to come. Kane couldn't seem to keep his head straight today. Bad sign. Had to keep your head straight if you wanted to go on living, though sometimes he wondered if he did. Sometimes, in the darkest hours of the night, when he couldn't sleep, he suspected that he was trying to con the universe into killing him when he wasn't looking. Other times, he wondered why.

There was an abrupt transition. One seconds, he saw flames and clouds, the next, the clouds were gone and rain was streaking against his pod, sizzling away in puffs of mist the second it hit the overheated hull. Lightning flared somewhere on the horizon and for just a few seconds, Kane could see everything around and beneath him. He half-expected to see the same writhing blackness from before, but only saw a vast proliferation of trees spread out before him, stretching off into the distance. He could just make out a few structures and some of them were lit. Ahead of him, almost at the same altitude, he caught sight of two other pods.

Not long now.

Kane tried to prepare himself, although he knew there was no real way to prepare for smashing into the ground at a hundred plus miles per hour. His efforts were further confused when he suddenly saw a dark purple flash from somewhere down in the forest, towards its center. "What the-" he began, then let out a curse as his something suddenly popped inside of his pod. Static washed across his HUD and the little screens built into the sides of the pod's interior crackled and distorted. A warning alarm began to cycle.

Something had gone wrong.

His pod was twisting now, off course, headed towards some vast, dark hole in the ground that he didn't recognize and filled him with an immense, immeasurable fear.

Then, with an earth-shattering crash, he was down.


	3. Chapter 03: Something in the Darkness

For a long moment, there was dead silence.

After the chaotic crashing of atmospheric reentry and the landing itself, it was almost painful in its purity. Kane could hear a ringing in his ears, he realized after a few seconds. He blinked several times, trying to get his head together. Impacts were always jarring, painfully dislocating, but this one was somehow a lot worse than usual. If this was a warzone, he might be dead right now. Taking a deep breath, the ODST reminded himself that he was, in fact, a Helljumper, and to suck it up and get his ass in gear.

There was no rest for the wicked.

He scanned the interior of his pod. The little screens surrounding his head in an orbit of technology were dead, some of them cracked. Kane ignored them, instead activating his radio as he began getting his harness undone.

"This is Corporal Kane to Sergeant Goll, I was thrown off course. Over." He paused, waited, heard the hum of an open channel. "I repeat, Kane to Goll, my pod was thrown off course, do you read? Over."

Still nothing.

"Great," Kane muttered, leaving the channel open just in case. It took a minute, but he finally got his harness undone. Once he was free of it, he hit the manual releases. The door to the pod blew outwards in a fury of sound that made him jump. Rain began falling into the pod and across his visor. He got up, grunting as he felt a few pains in his body from getting banged around during the drop. He stepped up and out, hand falling to the butt of the silenced pistol still in its holster. He activated his VISR function as he scanned the immediate area.

Or he tried to, anyway.

It wouldn't turn on. Frustrated, he tired again. His visor flickered briefly, then died. Well, this mission was off to a fantastic start. Kane stared into the gloom for a moment, trying to scan his surroundings. It was too dark to see basically anything. Turning around, he reached into his pod and grabbed the emergency medical kit off the wall. Clipping it to his belt, he then grabbed his final piece of hardware: the silenced SMG. It was a reassuring weight in his grip. He flipped on the barrel-mounted flashlight.

A powerful arc of white light cut through the darkness. Basically, he was painting a target on himself and asking all hostiles to step right up and take a shot at him, but it wasn't like he had a lot of options with his VISR function dead. Kane played the light across the area. For a moment, all he could see was wet gravel and mud. No trees. He kept turning, trying to discern where in the hell he had landed, and finally his light fell on something. The rusting, skeletal hulk of a tarnished, industrial yellow bulldozer.

He kept going, the light revealing a series of empty steel crates scattered across the muddy ground, the distant, uncertain shape of what might have been a trailer, and then, finally, a solid rock wall. It was a cliff sheer of wet stone, shooting skywards. Kane raised his light. The wall went up for a good hundred feet or so.

It finally hit him. The quarry. He'd landed in the quarry.

"Well...shit," he muttered.

Okay, first objective, get out of the quarry.

Kane began moving towards the uncertain outline he'd seen earlier. A structure seemed like a good as place to start as any. There might be a map of the area. He was going to need to find an elevator, or at least a ladder. It'd be a long climb, but he needed up and out of here. The gravel crunched under his feet and the rain continued to fall, beading and running on his glass faceplate. Lightning split the sky, lighting up everything in a monochrome glare. A second later, thunder cracked overhead, a particularly loud, sharp boom that made him jump. Kane scowled as he looked around, his heart hammering in his chest.

Christ, he was jumping at thunder now. _Thunder_. What the hell was wrong with him? "Come on, Kane, get it together," he whispered to himself.

As he set off again, he thought he heard a whispered response over the radio. He froze, listening intently, trying to block all else out.

"Hello? Is anyone there?" he asked.

Dead silence mocked him. He sighed and picked back up the pace. The uncertain shape of the structure had resolved into not a trailer but an actual structure, a main office it seemed. As he approached the main entrance, he hesitated. There were lights on inside. The rusty vehicle had given him an idea that the place was long abandoned, but maybe not. Or maybe someone was here who wasn't supposed to be.

Kane adjusted his grip slightly on his SMG and moved slowly forward. The structure was built on a rise, so he slipped up against the front of the corrugated sheet metal wall and moved quickly and quietly beneath the windows. He was a whisper in the dark. Kane reached the main entrance. The door was open. Rainwater leaked into a narrow corridor with muddy bootprints and a short wooden set of stairs led up.

After a moments' hesitation, Kane ascended the stunted stairwell and came into the building. The metal floor creaked under his boots, causing him to wince slightly. The pervasive sense of dread didn't abate as he walked inside the lit building, like it should have. He began moving through the structure, clearing it like he'd cleared a thousand other unknown buildings. He could hear the rain tapping against the roof and the occasional rumble of thunder...and nothing else. The floor creaked again ominously beneath his boots.

The first door led to a bathroom with nothing helpful inside. The second led to a storage room that was packed full of all sorts of junk, a familiar proliferation of tools, parts, items, equipment and random knickknacks that seemed to accumulate in places like this. It was so packed onto the shelves and tables, and so disorganized that it almost seemed as if it had grown there, some kind of metal and plastic plant life, growing millimeters over months when no one was looking. The third room was a kind of main area.

It was dominated by a huge wood and metal table scattered with paper maps and documents, cartography and geological tools and readouts and datapads. The peripheral of the room had more tables and some desks, work areas for the personnel who ran this quarry. It definitely looked like a lived-in place. There were empty cans of sodas, abandoned glass mugs that were stained with coffee, a smell of perseverance and perspiration.

What worried him was the way several items were scattered across the floor, as if there had been some kind of struggle. There was a mug of coffee among the scattered debris, the coffee making a dark stain on the thin carpet. How long ago had this happened? _What_ had happened? Kane kept moving, seeing one final door at the back of the room.

He walked up to the doorway and pushed it open.

A stark chill ran through his whole body, as if someone had touched ice to the back of his neck. He'd come to an office, probably the foreman's office. There was a desk dead ahead of him littered with more worksite junk, but it was what was behind the desk that so captivated him. There was a corkboard hung up on the wall littered with scraps of paper held in place with a colorful collection of pushpins.

Scrawled across this, overlapping onto the wall, in crazed, shaky lettering, was a message.

 _ **HE IS ALWAYS WATCHING**_

It had be done with a can of black spray-paint, which Kane saw discarded on the desk. What did this _mean_?

Finally, Kane managed to tear his eyes from the foreboding warning, wondering, despite himself, _who_ was always watching. Rousing himself, he looked around the office and spied a paper map taped to the left wall. He moved over to it and studied it, focusing hard on it. It was a map of the immediate area, namely the quarry and the mineshaft that it led into. After a moment scrutinizing it, he determined that there were two ways up. The first was an elevator shaft built into the side of the quarry, the second was a ladder that led straight to the surface that was inside the mine. Kane threw another glance at the message.

He didn't really relish going into a mineshaft, but it wasn't too far into the mine and the elevator was on the entire other side of the quarry. With a sigh, he tried calling out over the radio again. Nothing. Dead air. He turned and left the office, hurrying back through the main office until he was back outside.

As he stepped out, static washed across his HUD and suddenly, the feeling of being watched was overwhelming. Kane looked around, playing his flashlight across the stark, rocky environment. Then, for a reason he couldn't be sure of, he looked up. As he did, lightning again flashed against the sky, a magnesium flare lit up the whole environment for just a few seconds...but it was long enough to see something.

His heart flash-froze when he spotted a tall, dark, humanoid figure standing at the top of the quarry, staring down at him.

Then the flare died and there was only darkness above him.

Trembling with an unfamiliar level of fear, Kane pointed his flashlight up. The beam was just powerful enough to illuminate the area where he had seen the strange entity, though just barely. There was nothing there now. Kane shook his head, lowering his rifle and then turning and walking stiffly towards the entrance to the mines. He was not used to this level of terror. He knew fear inside and out, knew the anxiety that built before a big battle, knew the panicked fear that came with the battle, all of it in its many forms.

But this was different.

This was not new, but very old.

It was terror. Mindless terror that was a throwback to childhood, when the boundaries of the universe were not yet known and anything seemed possible. A fear of the darkness, fear of the space under the bed, fear of the closet or the attic or the basement, and what might be waiting. He hadn't felt it for…

A decade at least, possible even two.

Kane's life did not really facilitate the luxury of letting fear rule him. He had to get over a lot, and quickly. Something felt very wrong here on Darkholm. It wasn't just nerves. He'd like to believe that, it would be easier to believe that, but he was too familiar with himself. He knew that he didn't really get rattled, he didn't suffer from nerves, at least not in this fashion. So what was it? He honestly hoped that he didn't have to find out.

But he knew his luck was shitty enough that he would.

As he approached the main entrance to the mineshaft, he found his mind turning the memory of the strange thing he had seen over and over. It looked like a man...or at least a humanoid figure, but too tall. Way too tall. Taller than an Elite even. What did it mean? What _could_ it mean? There were too many unknowns here.

Kane stopped in his tracks as his radio crackled briefly. He listened, straining his ears against the whisper of the rain. A faint voice came to him over the dead air and he thought it might have been Hux's voice. It had that angry tone to it, but he couldn't make out even a single word. "Hux, this is Kane, do you hear me?!" he asked, practically shouting without meaning to. He waited, but nothing happened.

Kane realized he had tensed up and his back and neck ached from it. He made himself relax, tried the radio twice more, then, when he received no further response, sighed heavily, briefly fogging the interior of his visor, and set off again. As he made his final approach to the entrance of the mineshaft, he saw that he wasn't getting in.

The tunnel had collapsed, at least partially.

There was a cluster of metal support beams and huge rocks blocking the way. Kane set off again. He didn't want to admit, even to himself, that he was relieved not to have to go into that dark place. He had to be sure, though. There were gaps in the rubble. He walked up to the nearest one and pointed his flashlight into it. A dark tunnel was revealed. His light glinted dully off of ringed steel beams at regular intervals.

There was a figure, standing in the gloom, facing away from him.

"Hello?" Kane asked cautiously, then hated the way his voice sounded. "Identify yourself," he called, a little louder.

The figure didn't turn around, but it shifted slightly. Kane focused the light on it. Something was wrong with the person. They were maybe ten feet away from the opening. The figure uttered a feeble mewl. The sound was loaded with pain, with miserable, wretched pain. Kane had heard similar sounds coming from guys with limbs blown off or serious plasma burns. He'd made that sound himself when his appendix had been cut out by the crazed Elite.

"Are you injured?" he asked.

His voice echoed into the dark nothingness of the mineshaft.

He couldn't tell for sure, but it looked like the figure's back was...burned. It didn't seem to be wearing clothes. He couldn't tell practically anything about it, only that it was human. Kane began to open his mouth to call out again and prepared himself to start finding a way into the mine. Obviously this person was injured and needed help.

That's when the figure issued a shriek, turned around and began sprinting with a terrifying, impossible speed towards him.

Kane shouted in raw terror and only years upon years of training kept him from squeezing the trigger and hosing the figure down with a spray of bullets. As it reached the rubble dividing the outdoors from the indoors, it abruptly disappeared. Kane blinked rapidly, his eyes wide, chest heaving, heart hammering away.

It was gone, as if it had never been there.

Was he hallucinating? Had something gone wrong in his head? Kane turned around, scanning the immediate area. He had seen details of it as it had grown closer. It was thin, skeletal almost, and definitely burned up. Huge patches of skin had been blackened and burned away, and raw meat and in some cases bone showed through. Its face was a mask of impossible horror with huge black eyes and a wide, screaming mouth.

Was he finally cracking up?

There was nothing and nobody around him. No shapes or dark figures stepped into his flashlight's shaking beam.

Getting himself under control, Kane turned around and began making his way towards the opposite end of the quarry.


	4. Chapter 04: Obsidian Skies

The feeling of being watched abated, but it didn't go away.

If anything, it now felt less like someone or something was staring at him and more that the environment itself, the quarry, the forest, the air even, had somehow gained awareness and could sense him moving through it.

And it didn't like him.

It was a paranoid thought, a crazy one, but it was there nonetheless. Kane ignored it all to the best of his ability, instead focusing almost viciously on maintaining his situational awareness. This was the perfect environment for a surprise attack. It was darker than ever now. No sunlight, no moonlight, the stars now hidden behind a thick cloud cover. The rain was coming down a bit harder. The soft staccato pattering of it came from every direction, a constant white noise. He stalked away from the collapsed mine entrance and the main office with its disturbing message, towards the elevator. It was still a good distance away.

Kane had spent a lot of time alone in his career.

He'd had to put up with a great deal and as such he'd built up quite a tolerance against things like discomfort, fear, hunger, sleep deprivation. So why was he feeling this way? On the surface it made him ashamed, but below that it worried him. He saw two possible scenarios to explain this level of anxiety and fear. Either something had gone wrong in him, or something was wrong with his environment.

What he was feeling felt almost...external. As if it was being imposed on him, almost like a side effect of radiation or some noxious gas. Had the Covenant developed some new psychological warfare tactic? He knew there were certain frequencies of sound that were just below the threshold of human hearing, but not so low that they could not be sensed. Being exposed to these produced inexplicable feelings of dread and apprehension. Was that what was happening here? It wasn't impossible, but it seemed unlikely.

Then again, this whole thing had felt weird from the beginning.

Kane picked up the pace. He wanted up and out of this damned quarry. He played his light across the surrounding environment, but there was just more wet gravel, distant rainwater-slicked walls of rock to his left and right, and the occasional piece of evidence of a mining operation. He spied a few more crates that looked like they'd just been dropped, an industrial yellow forklift, a pair of mostly empty supply sheds.

He paused as his light revealed a bright yellow hardhat.

It had blood on it.

Kane approached the hardhat and knelt. He pushed it with the barrel of his SMG, flipping it over. There was more blood on the inside. Feeling an uncomfortable cold creeping up his spine, he got back up and did a three sixty, looking around. He remained alone. Kane picked up the pace again, this time jogging the rest of the way. A few minutes later, he'd found the elevator. He approached the broad metal shaft.

Clearly it was a cargo elevator, meant to bring down vehicles and back up shipments of whatever it was they produced around here. It was cut right into the rock wall. And it was without power. Kane figured it out as soon as he stepped up to the control panel. The elevator was not in its dark nest. He could just make out the flat, dull metal baseplate high overhead. He sighed, returning his attention to the control panel.

He spied a thick black cable sprouting from the back and followed it with his light. Maybe thirty feet away he spied the squat chromed form of a generator. Okay, well, he could deal with that. Kane set off, the gravel crunching beneath his feet, the rain continuing to fall all around him. He kept seeing that bright yellow, bloodied hardhat in his mind's eye. What had happened? It was possible that there had been some kind of accident, but…

But.

Could something else have happened? What? He looked around at the stark, rainy gloom that enshrouded him and imagined things moving in that darkness, just beyond his light's reach. Things with tentacles and snapping mandibles and razor claws. He shook his head, hard, and returned his attention to the generator, which he was closing in on. He shut those thoughts down with a harsh effectiveness that years of military service provided. Just nerves, he told himself, or tried to anyway. Kane focused on the generator.

Here was a problem he could fix.

Well, hopefully.

He crouched down by the device, studying it, checking it over to see what had gone wrong. It might just be that power was out in the region. What would he do then? Well, either see if there was an emergency ladder in the elevator shaft or find some way into that mine. Not that he wanted to. Not after...he shook his head, that had to be some kind of hallucination. But he'd never experienced a hallucination before.

Kane found the problem. The generator's energy cell was dead.

Well, he could fix _that_. Provided he could find some a spare cell. He stood up and played his light across the environment. There. Maybe fifty feet away, a supply shed. He began making his way over to it. While he did, Kane activated his radio. He tried reaching out to his team once more, and this time, he received a slightly clearer response, and it sounded like Hux for sure, but when he tried to respond, the signal faded, then died.

And he was left alone with static.

It made him feel a little better at least. The man might be nearby, and Hux, despite his asshole nature and bad attitude, would be welcome company after this quarry. Kane reached the shed and opened the door. The interior was dark and cramped. The left side of the small room was taken up by a pair of workbenches, the surfaces of which were scattered with greasy spare parts and oily tools. There was a stack of crates to the right.

And there, on one of the workbenches, was a power cell.

"There we go," Kane muttered to himself, retrieving it. He studied the solid, heavy square of black and silver metal and technology. The little screen on the side indicated that it was full power. Okay, perfect. Kane turned, mentally reviewing what-

There was a dark figure standing in the doorway.

Kane let out a startled shout and dropped the cell. Even before he could grab for his gun, the figure was gone. It flashed out of existence with a fresh lightning flare.

"God _damnit!_ " Kane snapped, shaking from the adrenaline surge. He took a deep breath and let it out, then knelt and retrieved the cell, hoping it wasn't broken. But these things were built tough, and it was still intact despite his mishandling of it. Kane carefully left the shed, SMG now in one hand, cell in the other, but still his isolation persisted. Thankfully, nothing happened on the trek back to the generator.

He made sure that the generator was in the off position, took out the dead cell, set it aside and slotted the new one. Once it clicked home and he closed the panel back up, Kane reactivated the generator. It hummed to life, and over to the his right, a few work-lights attached to the elevator shaft flared up, punching holes in the obsidian curtain. He felt a stupid but very real sense of relief at the sight of it.

Upon reaching the lift, he hit the down button on the control panel. Somewhere high overhead, gears started to turn and grind, power hummed and the huge flat lift began to lower. Kane looked around, back into the quarry, suddenly paranoid that his activity, (or more basic than that, his success), would draw unwanted attention. It wasn't an entirely irrational thought, but it stank of ritual more than it did of rational.

The lights revealed less of the quarry than he thought they would, almost as if the darkness was somehow thicker here on Darkholm. Seconds bled into minutes. The sense of tension from before was more powerful. Kane kept as vigilant a watch as he could, but nothing showed up as the lift settled into its nest. And there was nothing waiting on it for him. He quickly stepped aboard and hit the up button, riding the loud, slow lift back to the surface.

Finally, he was out of the damned quarry.

It felt like he'd spent ages down there, but according to his chronometer, little more than forty minutes had passed. He tried to clear his head as he rode the lift, tried to refocus on the mission, on his objectives. Right now, he had to either reestablish contact with his team or reunite with them. Then they'd probably have to at least investigate the status of the locals. He imagined that Goll would send him and two others off to the Marine outpost if they couldn't raise them on the comms while he and the others recovered the data drive.

That was, provided, things went as they were supposed to.

He had an idea that they weren't going to.

The lift finally reached the top. Kane played his light across the way beyond, as there was only one work-light on up here. For the most part, all he saw was trees. They seemed to be everywhere, extending away in every direction. However, there was a single structure up ahead, as well as a road that moved away to the left and a pair of well-worn paths that led off into the forest. Kane began to consider what to do next.

However, the decision was made for him.

He was aware of a presence about a second before a familiar voice called out: "Identify yourself!" It was Hux.

"Corporal Kane," he replied.

The team's resident medic walked out of the woods off to his right, lowering his SMG. "What the hell are you doing walking around with your damned flashlight on, Kane?" Hux snapped as he approached, coming to stand arm's length from him.

"My VISR is dead," he replied. "I think that purple pulse knocked it out."

"Purple pulse?"

Kane frowned. "Yeah, it lit right as we were coming down. Knocked me off course. It's why I was down in the damn quarry. I think it might be screwing with my radio, too."

"I didn't see any purple pulse," Hux murmured. He suddenly glanced behind him. "You seen anyone else? Civvies? Marines? Anyone?"

"...no," Kane replied after a moment. He almost told him about the strange, burned figure he'd seen in the mineshaft, but he didn't think it counted. Nor did he want Hux to think he was coming unhinged. The medic was already concerned enough about Kane's mental status. God knew he'd given the guy enough ammo over the months towards recommending him for a Section Eight. "I found some weird shit down there, though."

"Weird shit?"

"Found a hardhat with blood on it, and it looked like there was an altercation in the main office down there. What about you?" he asked.

Hux grunted, again glancing around. "I dunno, thought maybe someone was tailing me...come on, I was going to check that building out." He turned and began walking towards the low, rectangular structure up ahead. As they neared it, Kane realized it was a simple public bathroom. They headed into the men's side first.

"What have you been doing since touchdown?" he asked.

"Trying to get in touch with the squad, or anyone, really," Hux replied. He sounded frustrated and agitated. "But my radio's been pretty crap. I thought I heard you a few times, and I did manage to get a partial transmission from Sergeant Goll. I caught that he wants us all to regroup at the Ranger's Station, which is about a mile north of here. So we at least have an objective."

That bolstered Kane's spirits a bit as they searched the men's room. Nothing there but a lonely row of empty stalls, sinks and urinals. They headed back outside and crossed over into the women's side. "I checked out some cabins on the way here. Two of them were empty, like they hadn't been used in a while, but the third one seemed like someone had been there, and they'd been...taken," Hux continued. "So we've got that to deal with."

"Great," Kane muttered.

In the end, the public restroom yielded nothing worthwhile. The pair of them moved back outside and lingered at the edge of the forest, staring into it. Neither of the paths, nor the road, headed to the north, and time was a factor.

"Well," Hux said, "let's get to it."

"Uh-huh," Kane muttered.

They began walking into the dark, mist-shrouded woods.


	5. Chapter 05: First Encounter

As they walked through the dark, rainy forest, Kane found his mind wandering in an attempt to fill the time. His senses were telling him that there was no one in the immediate area, no threats, though that same vague sense of menace still hung on the air. He considered Hux as they stalked quietly through the damp woods. Despite his bad attitude, his aggressive tendencies and his propensity for starting fights with complete strangers...they guy actually wasn't all that bad to be around. He wasn't actually a jerk.

Kane could see the difference between Hux and other jerks he'd known in his life. He supposed a better term would be: Hux was not a bully. He didn't belittle or insult his fellow ODSTs, or even the Marines and techs they worked with and lived alongside. Hell, he technically didn't actually _start_ fights. During their rare leaves or their temporary stays on space stations or colonies, when the shit wasn't going down and Covies weren't raining plasma-laced death from the skies, he'd only ever seen Hux get into it with people who were looking for trouble. He supposed it came with the territory of being an ODST.

Hux didn't necessarily go looking for trouble, (for the most part), but he was going to be goddamned if he'd back down from it.

Which made him a damned good person to have your back in a firefight.

"So what do you make of all this?" Hux asked suddenly.

He had taken point and was leading the way a bit ahead, not looking back at Kane as he spoke. The fact that he'd even asked the question meant, to Kane anyway, that the guy was more rattled than he'd let on. In a way, Kane was glad.

He wasn't alone in his strange anxiety.

"I'm really not sure," he replied. "All of this is too...big. Too weird. Too many pieces. We can't get a clear image of what we're looking at just yet."

"Yeah, I thought so," he muttered.

"What about you? What do you think?" Kane asked.

He sighed. "I don't know. That's the problem. This doesn't feel like...like anything we've faced down so far. I mean, this doesn't feel like Innie stuff. This doesn't feel like Covie stuff, either. I mean, maybe Covie Black Ops, you know? But even that doesn't feel right. I've seen a lot of crap and this just...it feels _different,"_ he replied, then stopped talking abruptly, clamming up, probably feeling like he'd said too much.

Hux wasn't exactly the most emotionally mature guy.

Kane took another look around, studying his environment, trying to pull whatever details he could. He had to admit, he was out of his element. He was used to dropping into cities, colonies, fighting on space stations or in space ships. Not out in the woods in the middle of the night with the soft, omnipresent hiss of rainfall all around him. Everywhere he looked, there were trees and more trees. He'd turned off his flashlight, now that he had Hux to guide him and his eyes had, for the most part, adjusted to the gloom.

Still, it was hard as hell to see anything with much detail.

Lightning flared, printing the landscape in bleak monochrome once again, and his heart skipped a beat as he caught a flash of something tall and multi-limbed off to his right.

"Contact," he whispered harshly, freezing up. "Three o'clock."

Hux froze as well and turned. They both dropped to one knee, covering a different angle, hunting for the contact.

"Where?" Hux whispered.

It was gone.

"I don't see it anymore," he murmured. "It looked like..."

"Like what?!" Hux hissed.

"Humanoid, but it almost seemed like it had...tentacles," he muttered.

" _What?_ "

"Nevermind, let's just go. It must have been just some trees and bushes or something," Kane said, though his voice had no real conviction. He had seen _something_ , something _alive_. Hux either bought it or didn't feel like pressing the issue, because he just got back up and started walking again. Kane followed after him.

They made slow but steady progress through the forest after that for a solid twenty minutes. Kane had taken to watching the sides and behind them, no longer letting his thoughts drift. He was more paranoid than ever. So when Hux suddenly stopped, he nearly bumped into the man. Hux held up his fist. Kane waited.

"There's a structure up ahead," Hux murmured. "Looks like it might be someone's house."

"We should check it out," Kane replied.

Hux nodded. "Yeah, I was worried you'd say that." He sighed. "Come on."

They set off towards the house, moving slowly through the treeline and into the side yard. They squatted at the edge of the forest, considering the situation.

"How do you wanna do this?" Hux asked.

Kane still couldn't tell if it bugged Hux or not that he outranked him. He'd never said anything, and the way he asked stuff like that could just be his general way of asking things. He'd never once refused to listen to Kane, even off the battlefield.

"We should probably split up, which means I'll have to use my light," he replied.

Hux sighed, then nodded. "Yeah."

"I'll take the back door, you take the front door. Sweep and clear, but be careful, there's a good chance that if there is anyone in there, it's a civvie."

"Got it."

"Let's get it done."

Kane activated his muzzle-mounted flashlight and watched the pale, powerful beam cut a bright path through the darkness. He hated it, but he was practically blind without his VISR functional, at least in a combat sense. He moved up to the edge of the house with Hux. Both of them kept low to the ground, moving quickly to cover the open distance until they hit the side of the structure. Once there, they split up. Kane headed for the back door.

He listened intently as he moved smoothly down the length of the house, keeping below the windows. He hit the corner and paused. There was nothing to hear but the rain. Peering cautiously around the corner, he saw a simple set of stairs leading up to the back door. There was a small shed in the backyard and he saw a scattering of toys and lawn furniture. Deciding to clear the shed first, he hustled over to it and peered within, putting his light up to the single window. Inside there was nothing to see but some shelves and some boxes, nowhere to hide. With that done, he returned his attention to the house.

Kane moved smoothly up the stairs.

The back door was open.

Probably not the best sign, but maybe they'd complied with the evacuation order in a hurry. If the order had even been put out. He still didn't know where they stood on that. He stepped into a long hallway beyond, counting four entrances, an open one at the other end, through which he saw Hux, two to the right and one to the left.

Making quick hand gestures to Hux, telling him to check out the single door on the left, Kane moved up to the first one on the right. It, too, was open. He peered inside, playing his light across the interior. Just a bathroom, everything pretty much in order. It was empty. He moved quickly down to the next door.

This one was shut.

Carefully, he turned the handle, then pushed the door open with the barrel of his SMG. A bedroom this time, a child's bedroom. Messy and chaotic, but not from anything nefarious, just from an unruly kid. After sweeping it, he reconnected with Hux in the other room. It turned out to be two rooms, the door to the left had led to a combination kitchen/dining area, which was empty but also in a state of chaos. Several cabinet doors had been opened and all manner of silverware and dishes lay scattered across the white-tiled floor.

"Definitely a struggle," Hux muttered darkly.

Kane nodded. But what kind of struggle?

The final room in the ground floor was a living room. The TV was smashed in and one of the chairs was flipped over. No blood, though. No bodies. Not even any bullet holes, spent shell casings or plasma scoring.

So what the hell had happened?

In the living room was access to the rest of the house: stairs leading up and down. Kane made his way up and motioned for Hux to follow him. They crept up the stairs, the floorboards creaking painfully beneath their heavy boots and ODST armor, and cleared the second story. Another bedroom, an office and a bathroom.

There was almost nothing of interest.

Almost.

"What the hell is this?" Hux muttered.

Kane played his light across the wall of the master bedroom. In what looked like black paint, someone had hastily scrawled a figure. A tall, humanoid figure. It had no mouth and no eyes. Its face was just a flat plane of darkness. Though hasty, it was surprisingly well done. What was worse, the artwork depicted the strange, tall figure having several writhing tentacles sprouting from it. The sight chilled him to his core.

It looked _exactly_ like what he had seen in the woods earlier.

There was a message scrawled beneath this awful painting.

 _ **HE HAS ARRIVED**_

"What is this? This looks like...you said earlier you saw something..." Hux muttered. An uncharacteristic note of fear had slithered into his voice. Kane wasn't sure he'd ever seen Hux afraid. Worried? Yes. Tense? Definitely.

But afraid? No, not once.

It made him more than a little worried.

Before either of them could say anything further, there was a loud thump from somewhere below. Both men jumped in startled shock and then, wordlessly, they began hurrying back downstairs. They got to the ground floor quickly, stopped and listened, scanning the area. Before Kane could issue any orders, another thump sounded.

Both men looked at the descending stairwell.

"That came from the basement," Kane muttered.

"I got your back," Hux replied.

Kane nodded tightly and moved up to the stairwell. He pointed his SMG down its length. Nothing there but stairs and a closed door. Swallowing his anxiety, he began to move slowly down the stairs. Part of him expected the door to explode open and...something to show up. But he reached it without incident.

He opened the door.

Darkness lay beyond the threshold. The pair of ODSTs moved into the basement, tension obvious in their rigid stances and tight movements. There was a lot of stuff down there, boxes, tables, some exercise equipment. He saw a furnace unit brooding in the far corner. He kept expecting his light to reveal something…

"If anyone is down here, come out now. We're ODSTs," Kane said. "We're here to help," he added, deciding that might be kind of intimidating.

Suddenly, one of the stacks of boxes fell over. Both men snapped their weapons towards it. In the far right corner of the room, in a small area behind where the stack of boxes had been, he saw a dark figure standing and almost squeezed the trigger.

"Identify yourself," Hux growled.

A low moan came from the figure. There was something wrong...despite the fact that he was putting his flashlight directly on it, it seemed to be wreathed in darkness. He raised the light, trying to get a look at the person's face. His beam illuminated a pale face, a man's face, and his eyes...they seemed to be pools of liquid black.

The figure threw up its hands over its eyes and shrieked madly, then stumbled forward, towards them.

"Hold it!" Kane snapped.

The figure kept coming closer. Something was wrong here, really, really wrong. Despite the fact that this looked like a human being, everything in him, all his instincts, were telling him that this was not human.

It was something else.

Something Other.

"Stop, now! Or we will fire on you!" Hux screamed.

The man continued stumbling towards them, lowering his hands now and issuing another loud growling shriek. Kane lowered his weapon, aimed for the man's leg and fired. It was a risk, he could hit his femoral artery, but shooting anyone was a risk. He squeezed the trigger and a bullet whispered out. It was a good shot, it hit his thigh and he stopped. But only briefly. Now the man of darkness issued a roar and ran straight towards him.

"Put him down!" Kane screamed.

They opened fire, their weapons stuttering, pulses of muzzle flare turning the scene into a series of monochromed still-shots. He saw a good number of shots land across the mysterious figure's body, but it wasn't bleeding normal blood. Something was wrong but his frantic mind couldn't take it all in. He had to put this thing _down_.

The figured surged forward and smashed into him. Kane let out a startled shout as he flew across the basement and landed heavily on a table with a resounding bang. Okay, this person was _way_ stronger than they should have been, he thought as a dozen pains lit up his body. His suit protected him from the worst of it, but _damn_ that thing had thrown him hard as hell. He rolled off the table, trying to get to his feet, and heard a sudden thump.

Scrambling to his feet, his heart racing, blood thundering in his ears, Kane aimed his flashlight ahead, trying to figure out what the hell had happened. Hux was standing over a dead body, prodding at it with his boot.

"Headshot," he said. "Two of 'em, actually."

"What the hell is this thing?" Kane asked as he approached. "Cause it's clearly not human."

"I have no idea. Maybe this...some kind of new Covenant thing?" he suggested hesitantly.

"This doesn't really seem like their deal," Kane murmured. He frowned, crouching down and studying the body more closely. It wasn't as dark as he'd thought it was, and actually...now that he could _see_ it, he realized that its whole body was covered in black paint. The eyes though...that wasn't paint. Something was wrong with its eyes. It _did_ look like a man, a man maybe in his early thirties, short black hair, tanned skin. He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Despite his earlier assessment, he thought that this had once _been_ a human.

But something had happened to him, changed him somehow.

"He was way, way stronger than he should have been," Hux said. He was staring at Kane now. "There's a goddamned dent in your chestplate."

Standing up, Kane looked down at himself and saw that he was right. "Come on," he said finally, "we have to get to the rally point. Goll needs to know about this."

Hux nodded, casting another uncertain glance down at the strange thing that lay dead at their feet. Kane wanted to worry that he had just killed an innocent man, and perhaps he had, but something, some cold, near-dead voice buried deep in his core, calmly informed him that it was either kill or be killed, and even if that wasn't the case, whatever had been done to this man had done irreparable damage to him.

He was dead, turned into something else now.

As they left the basement and then the house, he couldn't help but wonder: What?


	6. Chapter 06: Rally Point

"Finally," Kane muttered.

He could see the ranger station up ahead. It had actual lights on inside of it, punching holes in the vast, rainy darkness that engulfed them. His relief was palpable. He'd been running what had happened in the basement over and over in his head, trying to parse it out, to digest all the relevant information. It was just too weird.

Hux hadn't said a word since they'd left the basement.

Kane hit the stairway that led up to the ranger's station, which was built on a rise of land and would give a commanding view of the surrounding area. A good place for a rally point. As soon as they'd neared the clearing, he'd called out over the radio, warning of friendlies coming in from the south. Goll had responded affirmatively and it had been damned good to hear his voice. The pair of them came to the entrance and stepped inside.

Like the house's kitchen, the place was a mess.

It looked like a pretty chaotic fight had gone on. Desks were flipped over, tools and office supplies were scattered across the floor. A few of the windows were broken out. Standing among this chaos was Sergeant Goll and Ross. Lara, Thompson and Diaz were still missing. Kane felt a bolt of black fear shoot through him. Somehow, throughout this whole mess so far, he'd managed to avoid thinking about Lara. Whether that was because of his attempts to keep his mind free of distractions or because he wasn't sure he could face her death, it didn't matter: he was thinking about her now. Where was she? Why hadn't she shown up yet?

"Where are the others?" he asked.

"We don't know," Goll replied. "We haven't heard anything from anyone. Something's screwing with the comms. It has to be that interference the scans picked up earlier. Have either of you seen anyone? Ross and I landed close to each other and we haven't come across a single civilian or Marine," he said.

"We...came across someone," Kane said. He'd been considering how to report this. Goll fixed him with his unwavering stare, waiting for him to continue. "We came across a house and moved in to investigate. It looked like there had been a struggle and we found a civilian in the basement. He was...he didn't seem human anymore."

Goll stared at him. "What do you mean?" he replied finally.

"He had maybe four or five times the strength of an average person," Hux said. He pointed at Kane's chestplate. "That dent is from that guy we found. He was just a guy with jeans and a goddamned t-shirt. No armor, wasn't even buff or anything. We had to put him down."

Goll didn't like that. He frowned deeply, considering the situation. "Did he say anything?"

"No, he just kind of...growled and grunted. He'd covered himself in black paint. And that's not even the strangest thing so far," Kane replied. "I've been...seeing something. A figure, a very tall figure, with multiple tentacle-like limbs. I've been seeing it in flashes of lightning and initially I passed it off as tricks of shadows, but it's persisted." He gave it to his Sergeant as straight as he could, hoping the man wouldn't think him crazy.

Goll looked at Hux. "Did you see it?" he asked.

Hux shook his head. "No...but we came across a...a painting in that house. The figure he described was depicted in the painting, so I'm inclined to believe him."

The Sergeant looked back at Kane, clearly mulling over the data. "Okay," he said finally, "I'm inclined to believe you, too, Kane. But ultimately it doesn't change our goal. This is how we're going to handle this situation: Ross and I are going to continue to the primary objective and retrieve the data core from the satellite. Kane-"

He broke off as a crackle of static hit their comms. _"This is Lance...zzt...endrix, I require assistance! I'm...zzt...shadowed by someone! Over!"_

"Hendrix, what's your location? Over," Goll replied immediately.

" _Oh thank God!"_ Lara cried, becoming clearer. _"I'm about half a mile east of the ranger's station. I'm being shadowed by someone. Over."_

"Okay, Lance Corporal. Continue towards the ranger's station. Kane and Hux will meet you halfway. Out," Goll replied.

" _Affirmative."_

He faced Ross. "Ross, find some paper or something, I want to leave a message here." He turned towards Kane and Hux. "You two, get out there and get Hendrix. You see anyone, our team, Marines, civvies, _anyone,_ you tell them to get here. If it's a civilian, I want one of you to escort them if possible. This will be our temporary rally point. Once you've linked up with Hendrix, you are to proceed to the UNSC outpost and figure out what the hell is going on up there."

All three of them responded affirmatively.

As Kane and Hux headed out, Goll was pulling a desk into the center of the room and setting up a table lamp on it, presumably to make it look as obvious as possible. He set a note beneath the light. With spotty comms and an unknown situation, it was a good a way as any to let people know to stay here if they actually made it to the station.

The pair of them left they way they'd come and hurried into the forest. Kane felt a slow dread creeping through him. Lara was no doubt being hunted by one of those...former humans. He trusted her to handle herself, he knew she could kick ass, but he was already feeling very close and attached to her after last night. That was the eternal conundrum of life, he thought as he and Hux set off into the woods, almost running east.

When you opened yourself up to someone, be it through friendship or love, you were pretty much painting a target on your own chest. Because when something happened to them, and something would happen to them eventually, because on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero, there was nothing you could do to hide from the pain. There was no way to avoid it, only to bear it. And then, on the flip side, if you just hardened yourself against everyone, stopped opening up...well, was life worth living?

Everything became pallid and mute, everything lost its meaning.

After a few minutes, they saw the flash of gunfire. Kane broke ahead, sprinting now. More gunfire. "Something's shadowing us!" Hux called.

Damn! No time for that now.

"Cover our six!" Kane called back and ran on.

He burst into a clearing where he found Lara hastily reloading. A pair of people, one of them a Marine, his fatigues giving him away, and the other a civilian, were advancing on her. They had that some blackness around their eyes that made them seem somehow alien and other. "Step back, now!" Lara shouted.

They paid no heed.

"On your six!" Kane said as he stepped into the clearing. She threw a glance his way, caught eyes with him briefly and then returned her attention to the two menacing threats. They were still advancing, breathing heavily, their breaths coming in raspy exhalations. They sounded like animals. Kane hurried up to stand shoulder to shoulder with her.

"What's wrong with them!?" she hissed at him. "I had to shoot one in the leg but they just keep coming!"

"I have no idea, but we're going to have to put them down."

"One of them's a Marine!"

"I know. They won't stop. They aren't human anymore, Lara. We have to kill them. Headshots only," Kane replied.

Apparently, that was all their allotted time because suddenly the two former humans bolted forward with a startling speed. They split up, each one taking one of them. The Marine barreled forward and dove straight towards him like a football player lining up for the perfect tackle. Kane managed to get two shots off before the strange, dark-eyed thing slammed into him and they both went sprawling to the ground. The first shot was wild, the second hit it in the chest. It didn't do him any good.

Kane found himself staring up at a mask of horror as the strange thing attacked him. The former human wrapped its hands around his neck and began squeezing. Being that the neck piece had to be flexible and was not made of metal, he felt his airway begin to close off. He bucked hard, his whole body, as panic flew over him, and managed to partially dislodge the attacker. But he was a tough bastard and managed to stay on and maintain his grip.

Dropping his weapon, Kane groped along his hip until he found his pistol. Gasping for breath, the edges of his vision beginning to boil with darkness, he ripped the sidearm out, shoved it up under the man's chin and squeezed the trigger three times. The top of his head burst in a spray of dark gore and it was then that Kane realized this thing, this strange former human, did not bleed regular blood. The stuff that came out was thick and syrupy, and black. It rained and dribbled onto his visor. Disgust washed over him and he shoved the corpse off.

As he rolled over to see how Lara was faring, he managed to get her in his sights just in time to see her grab the ex-human, turn around and yank him up and over her back, completely flipping him over. When he landed on the ground and began to squirm back into a standing position, she aimed her SMG at him and fired two shots into the back of his skull. The man's forehead came apart in a misting spray of black gore.

"What the fu...they bleed black!?" she cried.

"I told you, they aren't human anymore," Kane said as he struggled to his feet. His SMG was around here somewhere...he'd dropped it in all the commotion. Something was wrong, his brain was frantically telling him something, but he needed to find his damned weapon first, before he could rationalize about anything. There it was. He snagged it up and looped the shoulder strap over his shoulder, then turned to face Lara.

She was frowning, looking at the surrounding area. "I thought...didn't Goll say that you and Hux were coming to provide backup?" she asked.

Shit. That's what was wrong.

Hux was missing.

"Yeah..." Kane replied, flipping on his flashlight and scanning the surrounding gloom. He moved back the way he and Hux had initially come from, hoping to see something, anything to indicate where his squadmate had gone. "Hux, can you hear me? Where are you?" he asked, raising his voice slightly. There was only the misty desolation of the dark forest around him and the eternal whisper of the rainfall.

"Hux?!" Lara called.

Kane activated his radio. "Hux, can you hear me? Where the hell did you go? Hux, answer me, now! That's an order!" he snapped, panic gnawing at him.

Dead silence mocked him.

"Damn," he whispered.

"What happened to him?" Lara asked, moving over to join him. Kane shook his head slowly. He could see no signs of struggle, no blood, no spent shell casings anywhere. Replaying the battle in his head, he didn't remember hearing Hux say anything or an extra gun going off. The last he'd seen of the man, he'd told them to watch their six.

"Hux said something was shadowing us, he sounded certain. I told him to watch our backs," Kane murmured. "Maybe it...got him."

"It?" Lara asked. "What do you mean by _it?_ "

"I don't know."

Kane continued staring into the gloom surrounding them both.

Hux was gone.


	7. Chapter 07: He Has Arrived

"Something's wrong," Kane said.

"I feel it, too," Lara murmured.

They had been looking for Hux for a few minutes now and still had found absolutely no sign of the man. He couldn't even see any footprints. Suddenly, a crackle of static washed across Kane's HUD. For no reason that he could name, it spent a frozen black bolt of terror through him. He spun around and raised his SMG.

And froze.

"Identify yourself!" he yelled as his light illuminated a figure. Lara turned as well, staring at what the light have revealed.

"What...what _is_ that?" she whispered harshly.

It was humanoid, and very tall. Despite not wanting to, Kane could see it rather clearly. It was about twenty feet away. It had extremely long limbs and seemed to be wearing some kind of black suit. And his face, (somehow he was sure that it was a male), was...nothing. Flat blank white, with only the barest hints of facial features.

The longer he stared at it, the more the static interfered with his HUD, and he began to feel a sharp pain somewhere deep in his skull.

Abruptly, it popped out of existence and almost within the exact same millisecond reappeared about five feet closer.

"It can teleport!" Kane heard himself shout. He squeezed the trigger. As soon as he did, the strange slender being disappeared once more and reappeared to the left and a few feet closer. "Run!" he roared as he began turning.

Lara didn't argue.

The pair of them turned and began running east, towards the military base. Even in near blind terror and total panic his combat instincts wouldn't abandon him. He and Lara ran through the forest, dodging trees, sprinting away from this new threat. What was it!? What was this tall, slender figure that could freaking teleport!? This was so beyond the pale of anything that Kane had ever faced, had ever even thought _possible_ , that he had no idea how to react. All of his logic and reasoning and perhaps even his sanity had been kicked offline and he supposed that he should be lucky for his training. If he didn't have it, he probably would have froze up and still be standing there right now. It occurred to him that this thing probably had something to do with Hux's disappearance.

Kane threw a frantic glance over his shoulder. His ammo counter and NAV suite flickered as another wave of static made a slow roll across his HUD. He could see the slender mystery figure farther back, perhaps fifty feet this time. He turned and kept running with Lara, keeping up a near frantic pace, and when he looked back over his shoulder again, he didn't see the strange figure anymore.

"Wait," he said, slowing, turning. He scanned the area all around them. "I don't see it anymore. Do you?"

"...no," Lara said after a bit. "But I don't really feel like lingering," she added.

"I don't either. We should keep going. Goll wants us to get to the military base and see what their situation is," Kane replied. She nodded and they resumed their journey at a more reasonable pace this time. He activated his radio, "This is Kane to Sergeant Goll, do you copy? Over." He waited, only heard a haze of static. "Repeat, Kane to Goll, do you copy, over?" Nothing. He sighed and left the radio on just in case.

"What's our sit-rep?" Lara asked.

"Hux and I linked up with Goll and Ross at the ranger's station. Thompson and Diaz are still missing, no one's heard from them. Have you?" She shook her head. He grunted. "The only people I've seen so far are...those things."

"What _are_ they? What was that tall guy?" Lara asked.

"I have no idea, not even a little one. Well...I guess that's not entirely true. There's got to be some kind of connection between that tall thing and the former humans. I've been seeing it ever since I touched down in the quarry and I've been finding weird messages scrawled on the walls, talking about 'he' and 'him', and after I saw a hasty painting on a wall of that tall thing, I'm inclined to believe that the messages are about him. He's got to have something to do the people that have been turned...ugh, I dunno," he muttered, shrugging uneasily.

They both fell silent as they trudged on through the rain, keeping a sharp eye out in case the faceless horror decided to show up again, but Kane had an idea that it was gone. For now, anyway. His mind turned to other thoughts, perhaps because he wouldn't, or couldn't, think about the fact that there was now a teleporting entity on the battlefield. It was just too much. So his brain turned towards Lara...and last night.

"So, um, Lara," he said. "About last night..."

"We didn't get too much of a chance to talk about that, did we?" she replied. "Well, what I said earlier still stands. I'd like an exclusive relationship with you."

"And I want that, too. I'm just a little...concerned."

"About what? I don't really have any secrets that I'd keep from you. I mean, that would affect you," she replied.

"Oh, I'm not concerned about you. I'm concerned about me. I'm not sure if you know what you're getting into. I'm not exactly great boyfriend material."

"Why do you say that?"

He sighed. "In case you haven't picked up on it, I've got problems. Frequent nightmares, insomnia, trouble coping with stress, and I tend to be emotionally closed off. I'm trying to work on it, especially because you're in my life now, but...I'm not very good at it. And I'm not entirely sure that I'll ever _get_ good at it."

"Well...I knew what I was getting into when I asked you to bed, Ash. And we've all got problems. I've got problems. And...I like you. Give me enough time, I could see myself loving you...I guess what I'm trying to say is that, I'm willing to help you get past these problems, or even find ways to live with them. The only thing I really ask in return is that you do genuinely try. And I'll try, too. I think...what I want out of this relationship, what I think it will do, is that we'll make each other stronger. You're a good man, Ash, I chose you very deliberately. I didn't go into this thinking it was going to be a fling or a one-night stand."

"Well...thanks," he replied awkwardly. "And I will. Try, I mean." God did he want a cigarette. Next chance he got, he was lighting up. This was just too much.

Lara began to say something, but stopped. "I see the military outpost ahead," she said quietly. "Let me try to hail them." She turned on her radio. "This is Lance Corporal Hendrix of the ODSTs to any UNSC personnel in the vicinity, please respond. Over." They both waited, listening, and were met only with the cold silence of a dead channel.

She repeated her message twice more, then gave up.

"Come on," he said, "let's get inside and see if we can find anything."

They kept going, breaking through the treeline and coming into a clearing that surrounded the base. From his initial impression of it, Kane didn't think it was too large. It probably staffed twenty or thirty personnel. As far as he could tell, the outpost had itself a sturdy chainlink fence, topped with razorwire, surrounding it, establishing a firm perimeter. That being said, he didn't like what he saw as they came to the front gate.

"What the hell did this?" Lara murmured.

The main gate, a pretty solid piece of structural hardware, had been ripped open by what appeared to be brute force. He wasn't sure even an Elite could manage that. He suddenly wondered if that slender figure had been involved. It seemed unlikely...but, then again, the ability to teleport also seemed pretty damned unlikely, yet it had happened.

"I don't know. Let's investigate," he replied finally, stepping in through the ripped open gate. There was a parking lot beyond, not a very large one. He spied two rain-slicked Warthogs, carrier class, among the blacktop. They moved towards the first one to check it out, because having access to a vehicle would be pretty great, but as they came around to the front, they realized that that wasn't going to happen.

There was a massive hole punched straight through the hood and, impossibly, through the engine block as well.

"Holy shit," Kane whispered. They jogged over to the second Warthog and found it in similar condition. "Well, this sucks...let's see if anyone's still in there," he said, looking at the main entrance to the outpost.

He didn't think there was, the place felt dead, but they had to check. And even if they were dead, a UNSC outpost had potentially powerful tools they could use to help themselves out and expedite their mission objectives. Namely: a powerful communications transmitter. It would be pretty helpful to be able to call up to the _Winter's Edge_ and update them on the situation, possibly even get some more backup down there.

The pair of them moved up to the main entrance, which was also ripped open. He had a brief vision of the tall man prying the doors open effortlessly with his skeletal arms, metal rending and tearing like paper, sparks flying. He blinked the thoughts away and raised his SMG, light playing into a broad corridor that served as an ingress. Their footsteps echoed in the darkness as they moved slowly into the broad, open space. A pair of security kiosks flanked them on either side, simple octagonal stalls of bulletproof glass, meant to be manned by one person apiece. They were dark and empty, the bulletproof glass smashed.

Kane's light caught something on one of the walls. He felt another wave of cold fear crash through him as he backed up a bit, so that he could see the whole thing. Lara stared at it with him in silence, taking it all in.

Someone had spray-painted a huge depiction the strange slender thing he had been seeing all night. It took up most of the length of the section of wall it was depicted on, an enormous thing, with several slithering tentacles growing from it. At the end of each tentacle was a small human figure, shrouded in darkness, what might have been a black mist.

There was a message scrawled across the area beneath this.

 **THEY ARE HIS PROXIES**

"What. Is. This?" Lara whispered harshly.

"Proxies," Kane murmured. "That's what they must be. They're his Proxies. He's...controlling them somehow." As wrong as it was, as impossible as it might be, it felt right. In a weird way, it made a certain kind of sense.

"Proxies," she said softly. "God, that's creepy as hell."

"Yeah, it is. Come on, we've got to secure this location."

With difficulty, they pulled themselves away from the mural and kept walking into the darkness of the derelict outpost. They moved silently, the only sound was the eternal whisper of the rain, even more muted than ever now, and their boots, echoing hollowly as they walked the length of the entryway. It didn't last long, terminating in a kind of crossroads. The layout was pretty simple, the base was divided up into three sections.

To the right were barracks, training area, mess, infirmary, and rec room. To the left was storage, garage, power and maintenance. And dead ahead was the control room, comms, security and the armory.

"Where to first?" Lara murmured.

"Control. I want to know why the power's off," Kane replied.

She nodded and they pressed onward, deeper into the looming darkness. In a way, he liked being here, in this dark, cold hallways of scored and pitted steel and instacrete. Even as ominous and tension-laced as this was, it was a situation that he _knew_. He knew how to deal with this situation: get to the command room, identify the source of the problem, reactivate the power, reestablish communications with the _Winter's Edge_.

He could almost see them in a bulleted list of all-caps green words across his vision. Being here in this UNSC outpost took his mind off of the slender thing, off the mysterious happenings of Blackmore Forest, off of the former humans, the...Proxies. That word itself was haunting and ominous, laden with foreboding. But all he had to do now was complete his objectives, and he could do that. He felt confident he could do that.

Maybe pick up some extra firepower too, while they were there.

The door beyond the main crossroads antechamber led to a small passageway. They peered into every door they came across, since it seemed like a bad idea not to. Secure the area. He took right and Lara took left. The first door he came to led to a small office that had been trashed. The desk was flipped over, the computer console smashed, office supplies scattered everywhere. No body, though, but he did see blood.

Human blood.

And there were some bullet holes in the walls.

Well, at least he finally had his signs of conflict. Again, it was something he could understand. The office cleared, he moved on, checking out a small bathroom. He played his flashlight over a collection of sinks to the right, then a pair of urinals and a row of three stalls to the left. Had to check that out. He slipped inside and moved slowly and carefully. With the barrel of his SMG, he pushed the first door inwards.

It creaked open slowly.

Nothing. It was empty. He moved on to the second one and repeated the action. Still nothing. Kane moved on to the third and final stall, pushing the door open, eager to be out of here and get this part over with and-

Kane gasped and jerked backwards.

Hux was in the stall, hung from the ceiling, naked, his eyes bulging out of his skull, tongue protruding from between swollen purple lips, throat slit and-

The vision was gone in a flash.

Trembling slightly, he moved forward, forcing himself to look into the stall again. It was just as empty as the previous two. He quickly looked around himself, to reconfirm that he was alone, and he was. What the hell was _that_? Was he losing it? Was he cracking up? Or was this some kind of weird side effect of...whatever was happening here? Kane suddenly didn't want to be in this room anymore and quickly left.

He and Lara silently cleared another office and a small armory that looked like it had been picked over, and converged on the control room. Though it wasn't much of a control room. There were just a few workstations. He saw one corner dedicated to security, and the communications shack off to the right of the room. The main workstation near the center of the room, where the CO would coordinate from, remained lit, though dimly.

"Perfect," Lara whispered. "Watch my back."

"On it," Kane replied. He moved around the room, making double sure it was secure, as she settled in at the control station.

A few moments later, she explained what she'd found. "Well, I don't know why power is dead, but the base is running on its last legs of emergency energy. The good news is that we should be able to activate the three backup generators. The base apparently draws its power from a local power station. No idea why it's shut down, or why the generators didn't kick on, but again, we activate them, we will at least have that going for us."

"Where are they?" Kane asked.

"There's one in each wing. The first one is off of the armory, the second is at the end of the dorms wing, and the third is in the garage." She looked up at him, her face bathed in the pale green light of the panel. "Do you think we should split up?"

It would save time…

"No," he said, "the situation's too unknown."

She nodded, looking about as relieved as he felt. He didn't want to be alone, and that thought made him more than a little embarrassed. He was a freaking ODST, the hardest of the hardcore, next to the Spartans, and here he was, scared of the dark like a goddamned kid. But this situation...it was too much, too different, too unknown.

They couldn't afford to take many chances.

"Come on, let's get to it," he said.


	8. Chapter 08: Blackout

Lara got up from the workstation and joined him. They left the control room and slipped back into the armory. "Can you start the generator?" he asked. She nodded. "Okay, take care of it. I'll see what I can find here," he said. She went through a door at the back. He didn't have much luck, sorting through the gun lockers and cases, until a moment later when the generator snapped online and the lights flickered to life. He'd thought they'd be weak or flickering, but they were strong and steady. The lights and the hum of electricity went a long way towards soothing his frayed nerves. Lara reemerged from the generator room and helped him search.

They managed to find a shotgun and a battle rifle. Lara ended up taking the battle rifle, since it was more suited to her abilities: elegant, graceful and accurate, and he took the shotgun since it was more suited to his: blunt, forceful and very primitive. They managed to find some ammo for their respective weapons, and then returned to the main hall. Kane was glad to see that the corridor and the rooms they'd previously cleared were well-lit now. But he was less than thrilled to see that everything else wasn't.

"Guess it's just one wing to a generator," Lara murmured.

He grunted. "Come on, let's get this over with."

They opted to go down into the garage first. They moved ahead into the darkness once more, Kane playing his light over the barren walls. There were more signs of destruction and chaos revealed as they checked the area. A pair of large storage bays full of inert stacks of crates flanked the hallway on either side. They only managed a cursory inspection of each. Kane spotted a bright red pool of blood and some shell casings on the floor.

They investigated a pair of maintenance bays, really just glorified repair rooms of workbenches and tables scattered with oily rags, spare parts and dented, well-used tools, some lockers and a few pieces of equipment.

Nothing there, either, but Kane felt they were getting close to something.

They moved into the garage. He saw light coming in, but it was very faint. Glancing to the left, he realized that the main door had been forcefully ripped open in the same way the front gate had. More crates, some broken open, supplies scattered everywhere. A Warthog, another carrier class, this one just as broken and useless as the other two. Tables, chairs, all sorts of crap. Nothing of any real use, no clues to this growing mystery.

They moved across the garage, their footsteps echoing, and came to the power center at the back of the room. They quickly cleared it, and Lara set to work reactivating the generator. Kane moved back to the door leading into the garage, as it was the only way into the room, and stood guard. His mind was wandering, he was thinking of Hux. Where the hell was the man? What had happened to him? He couldn't keep the worry at bay.

In the garage, something shifted.

Kane jerked his SMG to the right and felt a bolt of icy fear shoot through him as he spied a dark figure lurching towards him.

"Shit-" he snapped and squeezed the trigger.

It was a good shot, three good shots actually, and if it was a normal person, they would have been dead, or at least dropped, as they'd gone right through the chest. The person coming towards him, the Proxy, was a former female Marine. She was still wearing her fatigues. Her eyes had that same shadowy effect.

He remembered something, suddenly, and aimed the flashlight up, at her face. She hissed in agony, throwing her hands up in front of her face, stumbling back. Light in their eyes hurt them. He filed that away for later. As soon as she lowered her hands, he squeezed the trigger. The round went into her forehead, above her right eye, and blew out the back of her head in a spray of black gore. She hit the floor like a sack of bricks.

"You okay?" Lara called.

"Fine," Kane replied. "Just a Proxy." He didn't like how unsteady his voice sounded.

"I'm almost done," Lara said.

A moment later, the lights flickered to life. As they did, it became more obvious just how bad the garage had been hit by whatever it was that had happened. There was stuff everywhere, a lot of it broken, the Warthog really dented and dinged up. More blood and shell casings, too. God, he was really getting tired of seeing crap like this. How many buildings had he come into and everyone had been murdered by the Covenant?

This was different, but...murder was murder.

Especially when he was the one who was having to do it. He'd never had to fight humans before, and although these things were no longer human, these Proxies had once _been_ human. As Lara emerged again from the power room and they began making their way back across the garage, an idea struck Kane.

"Lara, if the generators are tied to each wing, why don't we just go back to the command wing, since it's already turned on, and do what we need to do?" he asked.

She shook her head. "That's not how it works, unfortunately. The individual generators just control the basic stuff, like lights and outlets and doors, all three need to be on before it activates the big stuff like the security network and the transmission array and BioScan."

"Of course," Kane muttered.

They got back to the antechamber and looked around. The room itself and the way they'd originally come, were noticeably brighter now. They stepped into the final corridor. Kane wanted to hurry, he really needed to check in with Goll, let him know about Hux, get some damned backup down here, but he wouldn't let himself hurry. Hurrying increased the chances for mistakes, which increased the chances for death.

They began to sweep and clear the area, starting with the pair of barracks. They moved quickly and quietly among the bunk beds, found nothing and headed back to the corridor. As he stepped out, Kane barely managed to catch some dark movement before something slammed into him. A startled grunt of pain escaped him as he was picked up and thrown several feet. He hit the floor and he heard his SMG clatter away, the flashlight's beam flipping around madly. Something growled ahead of him, and he reached for the shotgun he'd grabbed.

"Ash!" Lara called, then let out a startled shout of her and he saw the staccato flashes of her SMG as it spat bullets. In the flashes, Kane went cold.

He saw half a dozen figures in the hallway.

He found his shotgun, brought it up, aimed and fired, going off of the scant memory of the location of the hostile he'd seen in the muzzle flare. In the stark yellow blaze thrown up by his shotgun blast, he saw the nearest Proxy's head disappear in a plume of dark gore, spraying the ceiling and the walls. Groping madly, Kane found the flashlight function on the shotgun and turned it on. The light sprang into existence, (he realized, belatedly, that the one on his SMG had gone out at some point), and he aimed at another one of the strange former humans as it came for him and squeezed the trigger a second time as it hissed in pain.

He blew its freaking head off as well.

Lara had backed into the barracks they'd come out of. She'd taken one of them down. Another was hurrying in after her, while the final two came for him. He took aim, preparing to decapitate them as well, when the closest one rushed him. It was a former male Marine, a pretty built one from the look of him, and he easily batted aside the gun, causing it to discharge harmlessly, and punched Kane in the chest hard enough that he didn't just stumble backwards, he was literally picked up and thrown. He grunted, pain shooting through him as he flew about five feet and hit the floor hard. The former Marine stepped forward, grabbed him, picked him up and threw him straight into the arms of the other Proxy. Kane struggled to fight them off.

They were strong as hell.

He managed to shove the second Proxy away, then turned and kicked the big guy in the stomach as hard as he could. It stopped him, but only for a few seconds. Kane turned around, driving his elbow into the second man's face as hard as he could. He heard as much as felt the guy's nose break, and it drove him back, but briefly.

These assholes were _tough_.

He'd lost his shotgun in the altercation, so he tore his pistol from its holster, stuck it in the big Proxy's mouth and squeezed the trigger twice. That put him down for good. Spinning around, he saw the second one making a grab for him. He backed up and shot it in the eye. As he prepared to hurry forward and check on Lara, she emerged in the hallway, looking around, probably doing the exact same thing: checking on him.

"They're dead?" she asked.

"Dead," he confirmed, retrieving his shotgun and then his SMG. Damn, the flashlight _had_ broken on it. Sighing, he slung it and switched to his shotgun. Oh well, it wasn't like he needed to be stealthy anyway, and the extra firepower would be nice against these Proxies. He joined Lara and they finished sweeping the area. Thankfully, there were no more dark horrors hiding among the shadows, and they reached the third and final generator room without incident. It was a simple matter to reactivate it and walk back to the control room.

"Okay," Lara said, settling in once again at the main control station. "Ash, I'm going to see what I can find out about what happened here, why don't you plug into the main comms and see who you can talk to?" she suggested.

"On it," he replied.

Sitting down at the comms console, he ended up wasting ten minutes fiddling with it and calling out to the _Winter's Edge_ , trying to reach them with increasing desperation. But no matter what he tried, what frequency he attempted, how he boosted the signal, he simply could not get through. Frustrated, he looked back at Lara.

"Have you found anything?"

"Yes," she murmured, studying the screen before her. "Though not much. There's a few reports here, but the database is scrambled. It seems that they got the evacuation order and began to comply with it. Several small teams were sent out to get started, and then they never reported back. And then...I don't know what happened. It's a real mess."

He sighed. "Great. Well, let's call Goll and see what he has to say." He reached out to the Sergeant, and was reassured to see that the radio signal came through loud and clear. Okay, so with the comms array working, local contact was possible, at least. "Sergeant Goll, Kane here. I've found Lara and we made it to the military base. It's empty. No one's here, and there's signs of an attack. And...Hux is missing. Over," he said.

" _Say again, Corporal? Over,"_ Goll replied.

"Hux vanished, Sergeant. And that's not the worst of it. Over." He proceeded to give all relevant data about the strange slender figure and the Proxies, and Lara got on the line to back him up, because it sounded pretty damned insane. Goll was quiet for some time after they wrapped up their report. Finally, he spoke again.

" _Okay. We've managed to locate Diaz, but Thompson is still missing. Hendrix, I want you to activate the local radar and navigation equipment. We're having trouble locating the data core, we keep getting off track. Once you do that, I want-"_

A new voice suddenly broke onto the channel. _"Sergeant! This is Thompson. I require backup. I'm holed up at a rest stop garage about a mile north of the ranger's station as far as I can tell. I was attacked by people, something's wrong with them...um, over."_

" _Affirmative, Thompson,"_ Goll said. _"Kane, get to him. Hendrix, nail down the location of the satellite and uplink the NAV marker to our HUDs. Kane, once you've got Thompson, link up with us. And everyone keep a sharp eye out for these Proxies, and for Hux. Out."_

Kane looked at Lara. She stared back at him. He didn't want to leave her again, and he got the feeling she didn't want to be split up either. But it was only temporary, and Thompson was waiting, possibly in danger.

"Good luck," he said. "And...stay safe, Lara."

"You, too, Ash," she replied.

They shared one last lingering gaze, then he left, hurrying to get out of the outpost.


	9. Chapter 09: Rescue Op

The rain had picked up a bit since he'd gone into the outpost.

Now, as Kane plunged into the treeline once more, leaving behind the relative comfort and security of the abandoned UNSC station, he felt a cold loneliness and apprehension closing in on him like a smothering fog. Kane tried to shake it off, this mission had been bugged from the beginning, but man, it just wasn't letting up. He'd been in awful ops before, real digging-your-way-outta-hell kinda ops, but this…

This made a rainy day with the Covenant look welcoming.

At least with those ugly things he knew where he stood. You just shot at them and they shot at you, repeat until one of you was dead. It was...simple. He liked simple. This was complex, and scary. Kane didn't really think of himself as a smart guy. To be totally honest, he'd signed up with the Corps so he wouldn't have to think. And for the most part, that worked. He followed orders pretty well, and what thinking he _did_ have to do, that was to say tactical thinking, he'd adapted to decently. He could think in terms of a battlefield.

But this was some pretty high concept stuff.

A teleporting tall guy in a suit with no face? Mindless husks, like slaves to him? The mysterious malfunctions and the strange energy signature?

Well, at least Goll was here to think for him, for the most part. Of course, Goll wasn't _here_ right now. If something happened, he'd have to think on his own. And, of course, the fact that he'd gotten promoted to Corporal was an irony all its own. He had to make decisions in the field, had to oversee people sometimes, had lives on the line. That wasn't new, not quite, but it was stressful. So far he thought he'd done pretty good…

Kane felt eyes prick on the back of his neck, like a frozen finger had touched him there briefly, and he twisted around, raising his light, scanning the woods at his back. He didn't see anything, but that didn't mean nothing was there. It could be this...slender man, or one of his Proxies. God, that word creeped him out.

Proxy.

He didn't know why, it just made him deeply uncomfortable. It was just a word. Why should a word inspire fear? The human brain was weird. As he made his way through the stark, rainy gloom, winding his way through trees and trying to keep up a brisk pace, Kane found his thoughts turning to Thompson.

He didn't know too much about the technician, because the guy was so antisocial. Okay, that wasn't true. Kane had initially thought that the man was antisocial, but really, he was just asocial. It was strange how many people didn't know the difference. Antisocial people actively fought against being social, while asocial people just tended to avoid it out of discomfort or shyness. They'd hardly talked at all for the first two months, and then, one day when Kane had come into the workshop to make some adjustments to his pistol, he'd found Thompson in there, making repairs to the team's gear, and they'd just started talking.

They'd talked for almost two solid hours. And almost none of it was awkward. He'd discovered that they had a lot to say to each other. In his own way, Thompson was funny, polite and sharply intelligent. Kane had had his initial doubts about the man, well, doubts that he was a good ODST. Bad ones did exist. But Thompson had proved him wrong. Although he wasn't the best at combat, he was good enough to keep himself and his teammates alive. Most importantly, perhaps, was that he operated spectacularly under fire.

Kane had seen the man repair a lot under pretty dire circumstances. In fact, they'd gotten out of a situation alive more than once simply because of Thompson's efforts. Besides being smart and kind, Thompson was diligent as hell. He'd known the man to work on an assignment for ten hours straight, with hardly more than a few bathroom breaks. After that initial talk, they'd sort of become friends, although to be honest he was never entirely sure where he stood with Thompson. Of course, that could be his own failing.

Kane wasn't the most social of men.

 _There_.

He felt it again, eyes on his back, and spun around. This time, he saw something. A pale, featureless face peering at him from in between a pair of thick branches. As he stared at the slender man, his pulse spiked and a wave of static rolled across his HUD. Kane fought down the terror he felt as he turned and began running, sprinting as fast as he could towards the nav marker. It was a hundred and fifty meters off now.

He made it twenty meters, and looked back.

And his heart leaped into his throat. The slender man was hardly five meters behind him, in full sight, clearly visible. And he popped out of existence, then reappeared a meter closer, coming for him. Kane buckled down and ran his ass off. There was no fighting this thing, he had to get away from it. He kept running for all he was worth: five meters, ten, twenty, fifty. When he looked over his shoulder once more, he was alone, there was no sign of his phantom hunter. Kane let out a heavy sigh of relief and kept going.

Before long, he'd arrived at Thompson's location.

He emerged from the woods and stumbled onto a path of hard-packed dirt that was wide enough to serve as a road. Not a good one, necessarily, but a functional one. Dead ahead of him was a dilapidated old structure of instacrete and metal. There were two garage doors along the front, and a more traditional door next to them. It was all one structure, basically a garage that doubled as a rest stop, that looked like it had seen better days.

Kane noted unhappily that several of the windows were broken out.

He activated his radio. "Thompson, I'm outside, on approach. Don't shoot me, over."

" _Acknowledged. I'm in the back room of the rest area. Over."_

"Coming in, out."

Kane hurried up the rest of the way. He could sense a presence nearby and wasn't entirely convinced he'd shaken the slender man. He finished crossing the distance and moved in through the front door, which looked like it had been forced open. The entry area beyond looked like it might have served as a very simple restaurant. It also looked like it had been in recent use. There were a few paper plates with the remains of meals on them, some burgers and fries, a half-eaten burrito. There was soda spilled on the floor.

"Thompson?" he called.

There was a shuffling sound and then an ODST appeared at the back of the room, through an open doorway. "Good to see you, Kane," Thompson said as he emerged.

"Are you okay?" Kane asked.

He nodded. "I'm fine. I think I lost those assholes that were chasing after me, but I'm honestly not sure. I've been hearing some weird stuff while I was waiting...are _you_ okay? You look pretty spooked yourself," he replied.

"I had a close call in the forest. That...slender guy almost got me, I think," Kane replied.

"That... _what?_ " he asked.

"You weren't listening in on any of our transmissions?" Kane asked.

Thompson shook his head. "My radio's been really buggy. I've picked up a few stray transmissions, but nothing about a...slender man?"

"It's...complicated. Come on, we should secure the area, then move on. Then I can explain how we're facing an enemy that can teleport."

" _Teleport?_ " Thompson hissed. "Come on, you're joking, right?"

"I really wish I was," Kane muttered. "We should secure the structure. See if we can find any sign of what happened here, although I think I have an idea."

As they started their search of the area, Kane explained what little he had learned about the situation, the slender man and the Proxies. Thompson didn't take it very well, and Kane didn't blame the man. It was very unsettling. He didn't like it at all himself. But he had to face it, because that was their reality. The restaurant was a bust, and the area behind it, where they stored the food and ran the business from, was about the same.

The pair of them moved into the garage, which was a dark, silent, inert tomb. Kane played his flashlight across the oily interior. There were no vehicles in the bays, but it was clear that there had been a struggle of some kind. Tools were scattered across the floor, as a foldout table serving as a workbench had been knocked over.

"I'm not seeing anything...besides the obvious," Thompson murmured. "Why are you using your flashlight, by the way?"

"Bad landing, knocked some of my gear loose, mainly my VISR function," Kane replied.

"That sucks. I should take a look at it."

"When there's time. Right now, we have to regroup with the others. We're close to getting the data core and then...well, _hopefully_ we'll figure out a way to cut through this interference and get some reinforcements down here."

"Big hopefully."

"Aren't they always? I think-"

Kane jerked to his right as he heard a wild shrieking scream, coming from somewhere nearby. Outside, he realized. He barely managed to get his light up in time to see a dark figure rushing at one of the windows. Before he or Thompson could do anything, the figure let out another howling scream and straight up _jumped_ through the window. There was a crash of shattering glass. Kane was trying to get a bead on the guy, this had to be a Proxy, but he hit the floor, rolled with it and jumped right back, smashing into Kane.

"Shit!" he screamed as he was sent flying across the room. He slammed into the wall with a solid and painful sound, then crumbled to the floor, the breath driven from his lungs. Gasping, trying to get his bearings, Kane struggled to his hands and knees. He looked up, saw the dark figure looming, coming towards him.

Thompson ran right up to the man, aimed his pistol at his head and squeezed the trigger. The Proxy's head snapped to the side, a spray of dark gore escaping the exit wound, and it collapsed like a sack of bricks. Thompson hurried over to Kane, offering him a hand. He accepted it gratefully and let himself be yanked to his feet.

"God, you okay? That looked damned painful."

"Fine," Kane replied, then coughed. "Ugh, man, that hurt like a bitch." He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. His chest hurt, so did his back. "Let's get out of here before any of the other assholes show up."

"What are they? What happened to them?" Thompson asked.

They left the building, looking around to make sure they were still secure. "I don't know. Somehow, this slender man takes people and...changes them."

"All by himself? He's gotten how many of these Proxies so far?"

"Too many. Given that he can teleport and apparently rip reinforced steel open with his bare hands...I wouldn't put anything past him."

Thompson shuddered. "This is weird as hell."

Kane nodded. "Yep." He activated his radio. "Sergeant Goll, Kane here, do you copy, over?"

There was a pause, then a static-stricken reply came back. _"Affirmative, Kane. What's your sit-rep? Over."_

"I've got Thompson. We're ready to regroup."

" _Affirmative. Sending you updated coordinates for your nav marker. Get here double-time, Corporal. Out."_

A new nav marker popped up on his HUD. It was almost two kilometers away. He sighed. "Don't suppose you saw any vehicles around, huh?"

"No, none," Thompson replied.

"Of course not. I-" He stopped as a wave of static washed across his HUD. It wasn't very powerful, but it was definitely noticeable.

"Whoa, what was that?" Thompson asked.

Kane looked around, suddenly apprehensive. "It's him," he whispered. "That's how you know he's watching."

"Where _is_ he?" Thompson whispered.

" _There._ "

Kane spotted the slender man, maybe fifty meters away, standing on a rise of land, staring at them intently. Except he couldn't stare because he had no eyes. But he was watching them, of that, Kane had no doubt.

"What...what _is_ that?" Thompson groaned sickly.

"Evil...we need to go, now," Kane snapped.

They turned and ran into the woods, away from the slender man, towards the nav marker. When Kane looked back over his shoulder, they were alone…

For now.


	10. Chapter 10: Apprehension

They walked through the rain and the stark gloom of the forest.

After several minutes, Kane was convinced that they'd lost the slender asshole. At least for the time being. To be honest, he hadn't felt secure or safe since they'd settled into orbit around this awful planet. As they wound through the forest, hurrying towards the nav marker, he found his mind yet again drifting, touching on thoughts almost at random. Of course, he was thinking about Lara. Worrying about her, wondering where this whole thing was going. The sudden relationship was bringing up a lot of good, forgotten feelings.

And a lot of bad ones.

Sure, you got that bubbly, 'new relationship' bliss where you couldn't wait to see them again and couldn't get enough of them, and being with them was like being high. Well, technically, from what Kane understood about human biology, it actually _was_ being high, biologically speaking. And that was just great, one of the best feelings in life. But that also opened you up to all the shit. The fear, the anxiety, the doubt, the worry. That hollow pain when you were away from them for too long. Kane tried to push the thoughts away.

No place for them now.

"So, are you really hooked up with Lara now?" Thompson asked suddenly.

Kane glanced over at him, then looked around. "Maybe not the best time to talk about that?"

"Yeah, sorry. I just...this is really freaking me out."

Kane sighed. "Yeah, we're hooked up. Just happened last night."

"How serious is it?"

"Pretty serious. I...we are in a relationship." He felt himself stumbling conversationally. He hated social awkwardness like this. "Um...how did you and Diaz meet?" he asked.

Thompson snorted. "We both got rotated into the squad about a year ago and I was doing my usual thing of avoiding social situations. For the most part, I prefer to be alone. But Maria just...wouldn't leave me alone. I didn't really know how to react. She was pretty open. And we just kinda hooked up. And stayed hooked up." He laughed suddenly. "I know, you're thinking that we don't belong together, right?"

"Not that, but you are pretty different."

"I know. She's pretty abrasive, and blunt, and rough, but I really like her. She's...good for me. She makes me better."

Kane smiled suddenly, in spite of himself and everything around him. "Yeah. I know what you mean. I know exactly what you mean."

Rustling off to the right ripped them out of their conversation. Kane snapped his flashlight over to the treeline, trying to see through the branches and bushes and thick foliage. They'd managed to make it about half the distance so far. But something was here now, with them. He was getting tired of these Proxies, they freaked him the hell out and it always seemed like they were always doing something new and unpredictable.

He couldn't really get a lock on them.

As if to prove this very theory, as he began slowly advancing towards the dark treeline, there was a scream from somewhere directly above him. He snapped his shotgun up and fired as he saw a dark figure coming down on him. The blast clipped it in the stomach, but that was all, and all two hundred pounds of the latest Proxy landed on him. As they immediately began struggling, Kane heard more of them, and Thompson opening fire.

He felt strong hands wrap around his throat and begin to squeeze the life from him. Reacting instinctively, he swung a fist into his assailant's skull and heard a crack. That at least seemed to daze the Proxy. With a tremendous burst of strength, Kane threw the thing off of him. Yeah, a thing, not a human. Not any longer. It helped to think about that. Maybe it was messed up, but really, it was a survival mechanism.

Because the reality of the situation was that all the guilt and remorse and bad feelings in the universe wasn't going to change the hard facts that this thing was going to kill him. Human or not, either before or even still, this Proxy was going to murder him, and it was reduced to an equation written in blood, as old as humanity itself: fight or die. Kill or die. He managed to get the thing off of him, leaped onto it, grabbed its head and snapped its neck. He heard Thompson shout and looked around.

There was his shotgun!

He snatched it up, twisted around, aimed and fired. And blew most of the head off of another Proxy, the slug shell ripping away a good portion of its skull in a dark plume of blood, bone fragments and brain matter. Something was shrieking wildly to his left. He twisted again and squeezed the trigger almost before he realized what he was seeing and the force of the slug shell literally picked up and threw another skinny Proxy several feet. It landed on its back, a gore-streaked, smoking hole in its chest.

"Damn," he whispered, shaky with adrenaline. "You okay?" he asked, lurching to his feet.

"Fine," Thompson replied. He was reloading his SMG. "I'm here."

"Hate those things," Kane muttered as he fed some more shells into his shotgun. He was really starting to appreciate the gun, not that his appreciation of shotguns had ever really been lacking. He finished reloading and moved over to Thompson. "You good? We've got to keep moving, get to that rally point."

Thompson nodded. "Yeah, uh...let's go," he replied.

Kane tried to assess if the guy was going to freak out. Thompson was stronger than most people gave him credit for, but he did have his limits, they all did, and this mission was a lot more insane than normal. Hell, Kane himself was having trouble keeping it all together. Although he supposed that shouldn't entirely come as a surprise.

But Thompson seemed stable.

They kept going, hurrying off into the rainy darkness.

* * *

They managed to make it to the nav marker without further incident, although Kane was pretty sure he'd caught sight of the slender thing off in the distance every now and then. And his HUD gave the occasional wash of static, though he could no longer tell if that was the unknown entity's influence or if his suit was broken. Well, either way this mission was _hopefully_ going to be wrapped up soon. They'd get the core, call up ONI and figure out what the shit they were actually supposed to be doing here. He still wondered about that.

And then, hopefully, they'd call in some people who actually specialized in this kind of thing. They must exist, some kind of shadowy branch of the military or government, or perhaps both, that dealt with the strange, the weird, the paranormal. This was certainly at least one of those. Extraterrestrial maybe.

"Sergeant Goll, we're going to be breaching the treeline from the north, about twenty meters away, over."

" _Affirmative, Kane. See your flashlight. We've got a problem, over."_

"What is it? Over."

" _Nothing immediately threatening. I'll show you when you get here. Out."_

Kane glanced at Thompson. The man looked just as worried as he felt. Great, another problem. Wasn't that always how it went? It seemed like Kane's life was just stumbling from one problem to the next, barely making it out each time, sometimes not whole. He felt a hot phantom stab of pain in his gut as he remembered that insane elite.

That big bastard.

He'd never found out who that elite was or what had happened to it.

They broke through the treeline and found the group standing around in a circle, apparently gathered around something, in a clearing. As he began making his way there, Kane realized that he'd come full circle: the quarry wasn't all that far from here. What a joke. He frowned as he counted heads and came up short.

Hux was still missing.

He'd been secretly hoping that they'd run into the man and just had forgotten to mention it. As he and Thompson finished closing the distance, he realized what the problem was: there was a hole in the ground.

"What happened?" he asked.

"It looks like the satellite hit dirt here and crashed right through to the mines below," Goll reported unhappily.

Sure enough, Kane could also see bits of metal glinting beneath his light.

"So we go down and get it," Diaz said.

Goll sighed. "I suppose so. If I recall, the nearest entry point is the quarry." He looked over at Kane. "Kane, you were there, what do you think?"

"There is certainly an entryway into the mines down there," he replied. "But it was blocked off. We'll need something heavy to get through."

"I've got explosives," Ross said. "I could blast our way in."

"That'd be dangerous, could cause further collapse," Goll murmured. "But there's got to be another way in...okay, we'll get to the quarry, blast our way in. If that fails, we'll find another way in. If _that_ fails...then I suppose we have this hole to try and get through," he said, nodding to the hole in the ground. "Let's go."

A new nav marker appeared and they all began heading for it. As they did, Goll drifted closer to Kane. "You were there in the quarry earlier, can you tell me anything worthwhile?" he asked, staring ahead, watching the perimeter.

Kane hesitated. Before, he hadn't mentioned the burned figure to anyone, but now? Well, enough weird shit had happened. "I saw something, when I was there, trying to find a way up and out," he said quietly.

"What? The figure? The tall man?" Goll asked.

"No. I mean, yeah, I did, but I saw something else. When I was investigating the entrance to the mineshaft, I saw someone standing a few feet in. They were facing away from me, civilian, I thought, but it was too hard to tell. They were...burned up. When I called to them, started trying to find some way in to help, they turned towards me and began running at me. And then the person just...vanished. It was like a hallucination."

Goll was quiet. Finally, he grunted uncomfortably. "I wasn't going to say anything," he said softly, "but I saw something like that, too. Before I'd linked up with anyone else. Saw this guy hanging from a tree, by a noose. Went to investigate, soon as I got close he started kicking and screaming, broke out of the noose, hit the ground running coming right for me. Then popped right out of existence. Vanished, like he was never there. I get the feeling we've all seen something like that by now." He fell silent again.

"What do you make of it?" Kane asked after a bit.

"I don't know. Might be a side effect of that weird energy signature we picked up. It's not unheard of, exactly, certain types of energies and frequencies of sound can produce psychological side effects. Though nothing so...vivid, and specific, as this. Too much is weird on this mission and when we get out of here, I fully intend to find whoever the hell sent that message and put my boot up his ass. This was damned stupid and dangerous, throwing us in here like this with no warning, no intel. Don't worry, we'll get it done."

"We'll get it done," Kane agreed.

They hit the quarry ten minutes later. It felt good to be back with the squad. Any Proxies they came across were going to get the ass-kicking of a lifetime. But there were no more Proxies, and he didn't sense the presence of that strange thing anymore. Why were they being left alone? What was going on? It didn't feel good, like the evil forces in this area were saving up for something, and Kane just kept waiting for the hammer to drop.

But they got to the cargo lift he'd initially taken up a few hours ago (had it only been a few hours? It felt like much longer,) and rode it back down without incident. Kane, Lara and Diaz went first, to make sure it worked and secure the area below. Kane looked over the familiar environment, feeling a strange dislocation as he walked around, hunting the shadows for signs of life. When he'd been here before, he'd been alone, afraid, apprehensive. Now, well...he was still afraid and apprehensive. But at least he wasn't alone.

It was amazing how much even one other human could do to boost morale, let alone having most of his whole squad there.

"We're secure down here, Sergeant. Over," Kane reported.

" _Affirmative. Coming down now. Out."_

Kane listened to the lift come back down, the sound loud and lonely in the darkness. The rain had picked up a bit again, but at least he wouldn't have to put up with it much longer, since they were going somewhere with a roof over their heads. As soon as Goll and the others came down, they made their way swiftly across the quarry.

"Kane, Hendrix, search the structures to the right, Diaz, Thompson, the structures to the left. I'll watch Ross's back. We meet up at the mine's entrance when we're done," Goll said.

There were a string of affirmative replies and they split up. Kane and Lara moved away from the squad, over to the buildings he'd initially investigated so long ago. They checked out the handful of smaller storage structures in silence, found nothing, and headed into the main building. It was basically the same as when he'd left it last.

"How you doing?" Lara asked.

"Holding steady, for the most part. You?" he replied.

"I'm kinda freaked, but I'm glad we'll be getting this over with." She grinned suddenly. "I'm looking forward to getting back to the ship for some downtime, if you know what I mean."

He laughed unexpectedly. "Uh...yeah, I think I get your drift. And me too."

"So I wasn't a disappointment?" she asked.

"What? No, of course not. Was I?"

Lara laughed. "You don't have to be so serious all the time, Kane. No. You weren't. Last night was awesome," she replied.

"I...yeah, sorry. I do that, too. Not the best sense of humor."

"It's okay, we'll work on that…whoa."

They'd come to the foreman's office. Kane had actually almost forgotten about the message, scrawled in black paint, across the far wall.

"'He is always watching.' Well...I guess we know who it is," she murmured.

"The slender man...or that's at least what I've started thinking of him as. If it is a him. I don't even know what the hell it could be," Kane replied.

She sighed. "It's a mystery. An enormous one. I'm not sure we'll actually figure it out. It seems like one of those things where you'll be lucky to unravel even a tiny fraction of it, you know what I mean?"

He nodded. "Come on, this place is dead, we should regroup."

They headed back outside and saw Thompson and Diaz doing the same. The four of them met back up with Goll and Ross a moment later.

"How's it going?" Kane asked.

"We're good, Ross is finished. Didn't see anything in the tunnel beyond," Goll replied.

"Back up," Ross said as he stood.

The squad fell back to a safe distance. Kane felt his whole body tense, this was going to be damned loud and might attract the attention of something undesirable. But they had to do this. A few seconds passed in ominous silence, broken only by the staccato patter of rainfall, and then Ross activated the shaped charges he'd set and a sharp crack and bright flash blew through the air. As the echoes died away, Kane peered up at the top of the quarry, hunting for signs of life, but he could see nothing. Not that he could see a whole lot as it was.

"We're clear, it worked," Ross said.

"Let's go," Goll replied.

They came to the dark maw of the mineshaft. Kane felt a shiver of fear ripple down his spine as he crossed the threshold, coming into the pitch black tunnel, becoming illuminated by his flashlight. He hated this his VISR didn't work.

Goll began to say something, but was cut off abruptly as a new transmission came onto the air. _"Squad...need help...Hux...need help..."_

It was definitely Hux's voice, but Kane thought something sounded wrong. Off, somehow. Goll replied immediately. "Hux! Where are you?"

" _In the mines..."_

A nav marker suddenly appeared. "Kane, Ross, get there, help him," Goll said. "We'll go in deeper, get the data core, meet up back here, got it?"

Kane had his doubts, but he wouldn't let them stop him. Hux was in trouble, one way or the other, and they were going to help him.

However they could.

"Got it," he said.

Kane and Ross headed off into a side tunnel, towards the nav marker.


	11. Chapter 11: Into the Void

Ever since the _Winter's Edge_ had settled into orbit around Darkholm, Kane had felt a background frequency of fear settle over him like an icy mist. For the most part, it hadn't let up. He'd been stuck with it. But here, now, beneath the earth, in the dark, claustrophobic gloom of the mining operation, it felt so powerful it was almost choking. He had taken point, since he needed his flashlight to see, and Ross was right behind him, an immensely reassuring presence at his back. Kane was embarrassed to admit it, even to himself, but he couldn't imagine having to do this alone. He'd put up with a lot, pushed through a lot.

But this mission was too much for him.

No, he told himself. It wasn't. It wasn't too much. He could handle this, goddamnit. He'd push through it like he'd pushed through everything else in his life. To try and make himself feel better, Kane told himself what he often told himself in bad situations: soon, this will just be a memory. As he thought this, he suddenly wanted to see the sun again. The sun, even an alien sun that this ball of mud and rock orbited, was something he abruptly missed dearly, almost painfully. But he had to get through this, one step at a time.

The nav marker was about twenty meters away now.

To distract himself, or at least keep himself from flipping out, he thought about Mike Ross. When they were on the ground together, boot-deep in the shit, he was all business. But when they were on the ship, or enjoying some R and R, the guy was a party animal. He was one of the few people Kane had met that could match him drink for drink. He also knew that the man had a weakness for gambling, although he had yet to see him lose big. He was always laying bets on the ship. It had actually become a small game for Kane and the others.

What was the most ridiculous thing they could bet Ross to do?

So far, Kane had seen the man drink a bottle of BBQ sauce, attempt to eat a freaking five pound gummy bear, and eat a jar of ghost peppers.

Ross was a source of entertainment all his own.

But beneath it all, beneath the jokes and the drinking and the good times, Kane could sense a great pain in there, and, after several months, had learned the origin of that pain. It had been after a nasty firefight on a moon being overrun by the Covenant. They'd been evacing civilians, the moon was lost and they were pulling out. It seemed like one too many emergency transports had been shot down that day, and after they'd pulled out and made the jump to slipspace, he and Ross had ended up heading down into one of the hundreds of maintenance passageways buried beneath the deckplates, bringing a bottle of powerful booze with them.

They just sat there and passed it back and forth.

And then, without any apparent provocation, Ross started telling him about how his wife was killed in a Covenant raid ten years ago when he was offworld. He said nothing had ever been the same after that, and he'd gone through some pretty dark times. He'd gone a little crazy, and ended up disappearing one day when he was tasked with getting some Marines out of a Covenant occupied city. When he'd arrived, they'd all been dead, and he'd just...lost it. He said there was a gap in his memory. Apparently, for about a week and a half, he'd traveled all over that city, waging a one-man war on the Covenant.

He still didn't know how he'd survived.

After that, he'd come to a kind of realization: his wife wouldn't want him miserable and suffering, even if she was gone, and so he'd done his best to make peace with the hole in his heart, and did what he could to be happy.

Kane hadn't really been sure how to react.

But it helped explain a lot about the stocky demolitions expert.

"So what happened to Hux?" Ross asked. "I never really got a clear reading on that."

"Neither did I," Kane replied grimly. "One second he was there, the next he was gone. We were hurrying to get to Lara's position, she was under attack, and that slender man thing was chasing us through the woods. I'd thought we'd shaken him when we got to the clearing and I went to help her. By the time me and her had put down the Proxies, I turned back and Hux was just...gone. I didn't hear _anything._ And there was no sign of him, hasn't been since."

"You think something happened to him?" Ross asked quietly.

"I think it's more than a little suspicious that he suddenly pops back up right here, right now. And, I mean, you heard him. Something sounded..."

"Off."

"Yeah."

"Well, one way or the other, we'll figure it out. It's what we do."

"Isn't that the truth," Kane muttered.

The tunnel seemed to close in on them as they pressed ever onward. He began to hear water dripping somewhere nearby and figured the rain must be getting in somehow. The walls of dark rock crept by, shadows crawling across them like living things, and occasionally they would come upon a side tunnel and have to check it out. No sense in letting someone get behind them. Thankfully, they all seemed to dead-end before too long.

Distantly, he heard something smack into something else, like a rock falling onto the ground. They both hesitated, checking the area, then continued along. They were within ten meters of the nav marker now.

"Hux, are you there?" Ross asked over the comm. His voice sounded strangely anxious. It seemed alien to him. "Hux?"

Nothing. Dead silence.

The tension was stronger than ever as they finally came to the end of the tunnel, which opened into a rounded cavern. Kane's mouth was dry and his heart was hammering in his chest. He could feel sweat gathering on his body.

"Hux?" he asked, slowly playing his light across the right side of the cavern. There was evidence that the mining operation had been here, though not in any serious capacity. There were some basic tools in the dirt, a few crates, a foldout table covered in grit and rocks. But no sign of Hux. The nav marker was in the dead center of this cavern. He looked up, wondering where the man could be, if this was real or not.

"Hux, it's Ross and Kane, we're here to get you out of here," Ross said.

Still nothing.

"Maybe it was a glitch," Kane murmured. "Maybe he meant to send us elsewhere."

"Maybe..." Ross replied softly. "I think-"

Brilliant yellow staccato flashes flared as gunfire exploded into existence. Silenced rounds ricocheted off the rocks all around them.

"Hux! Stop firing!" Kane screamed as he broke right, away from the fire, immediately recognizing the silenced weapon.

No response, just more bullets. Kane caught a flash of dark armor ahead, half-hidden behind a pillar. Crap. He switched to his SMG, aimed and fired, going low, trying to get the man's knee. Was he a Proxy? Or just freaked out, or confused? Kane missed, his rounds sparking off the pillar, and then Hux was reloading. Kane barely managed to catch a glimpse of Ross breaking around for the other side of the pillar. Okay, he was going to take him down from behind. Kane just had to keep him occupied. He fired off a few shots, then ducked down behind a crate.

"Hux! We're here to help! Stop firing, goddamnit!"

Still nothing, but then he heard a grunt and the sound of bodies slamming to the ground. Immediately, he sprang up, letting his SMG hang by its sling, wanting his hands free. He saw Ross wrestling with Hux on the ground, having tackled him and forced him out from the pillar. Suddenly, Hux pushed the man up, got his feet under him and straight up sent Ross _flying_ through the air, right into Kane.

They both grunted in pain as they went sprawling. Goddamn, how strong was he!? Probably stronger than any of the other Proxies they'd encountered so far, because on top of being a damned ODST, the man had that suit of armor. Both men struggled to their feet, Kane gasping, as the wind had been knocked out of him. Ross was built like a damned rock. Hurting and dazed, Kane groped for his SMG, but realized it had been crushed by the two men, the barrel pinched, useless. He tossed it away, and as Hux let out an inhuman shriek and began coming for them, he lost all doubt that the man was a Proxy.

They were going to have to kill him.

Provided that was a thing they could even do.

Hux ran straight for them, barreling at them like a force of nature, and he punched Kane hard enough in the chest that he was picked up and thrown backwards several feet, and felt his chestplate crack a little bit. He heard Ross throw himself at the man once more as he got back to his feet. Groping for his shotgun, wanting to end it quick, Kane saw Ross deliver a punch to Hux's face, protected by his helmet, hard enough that Hux stumbled backwards, his head snapping back and a spray of glass flying as his visor shattered.

When he regained his footing and stared at them through the fragmented remains of his visor, it was like looking at a demon, a thing of psychosis. Kane found his shotgun and raised it. Hux screamed and threw his hands up as the flashlight's beam hit him right in the eyes. Kane fired, but Hux had already dodged out of the way. Ross brought his SMG into play and stitched a line of bullets across the area, a few of them landing, but Hux was _fast_. He howled in what sounded like pained fury and threw his SMG at Kane, who barely managed to duck it. Kane decided they needed to end this, and fast, and bolted forward.

He pulled out his pistol and snapped it up, barely taking the time to aim before squeezing the trigger three times in quick succession. He saw Hux's face, twisted into a snarl, before it disappeared in a cloud of dark gore, obliterating him from existence. He'd been in the process of coming towards him, so when his life, or what passed for life in a Proxy, was blasted out of him, he crashed forward, collapsing with a startling speed.

Kane never really got over that weird feeling of unreality that dosed his psyche each time he saw a once living being become a corpse, even if it was a Covenant, and he'd killed a fair amount of them. He thought it had something to do with how fast they slammed to the ground, and how, just a split second before, they had been full of life.

"Damn," Ross whispered, coming to stand beside Kane. "Damn," he repeated.

"I killed him," Kane muttered.

"You had to."

"I know...I hate that."

"So do I..." Ross sighed and activated his radio. "Sergeant Goll, this is Ross, over."

" _I hear you, Ross. What's going on over there? I heard shots. Over."_

"We found Hux. He was a Proxy. He's dead...over."

A beat of silence. _"Shit. Well, we have the data core. Get back to the entrance, bring Hux. Out,"_ Goll replied.

"I'll do it," Ross said.

Kane felt like arguing, like it was his responsibility, but no words came, and he simply watched Ross walk over and retrieve the corpse. He felt a mute numbness settle over him as the two of them walked back through the tunnel, retracing their steps. Before he knew it, they were back at the entrance, reunited with Thompson, Diaz, Goll and Lara.

"Dammit," Goll whispered when he saw Hux's corpse. "I hate this place. Come on, we're going back to the outpost and we're going to call the _Winter's Edge_."

Kane nodded, still feeling despondent and disconnected, knowing he was going to have to get over this, and fast, because it wasn't over yet-

As they stepped out into the quarry, a dozen spotlights suddenly burst into existence, and all at once Kane realized that there were at least a few dozen huge figures around them. Not Proxies, not the slender man, something far more familiar…

Elites.

And they were all armed.

All of the ODSTs raised their weapons.

"Drop your weapons, Imps!" a deep voice called out. "Now!"

"Sergeant?" Kane asked.

"Shit...stand down," Goll muttered, slowly lowering his weapon. "Can't win this one."

Kane lowered his own weapon, then dropped it, as he saw the huge group of Elites move silently towards them.


	12. Chapter 12: Confinement

**PART TWO**  
– _LEAVING HOPE_ –

* * *

Noxa 'Zarixee stared with barely contained contempt at the six dark-clad humans as they began walking in a single file towards the lift he and his consignment had ridden down. It was a genuine difficulty not to draw his blade and behead all of them, one by one, this very instant. They were disgusting filth, beneath him, and it was only the Prophet of Justice's wise words and strict orders that stayed his hand.

He tried to take his mind from the miserable Imps ahead of him and instead looked around his environment. Truly, this was the most miserable, pathetic world he had ever had the misfortune to inhabit. Rain-slicked rock walls surrounded him. At least they would be up and out of this rock pit very soon. Noxa realized that his second in command was hoping to garner his attention. He glanced over briefly.

"Yes?"

Brex fell in step beside him. "I have updates, Commander."

"Speak then."

"The _Righteous Fury_ remains secure in orbit. The human vessel has not returned to challenge us. The Prophet of Justice's orders stand."

"How goes construction of our command center?" Noxa asked, growing impatient.

"Construction is approximately fifty percent complete. Projected time puts us at maximum efficiency in four units."

"Tell them to do it in three or all will suffer the consequences."

"Yes, Commander."

"What of the energy? And our communications?"

"The energy blanket remains an enigma, but the _Fury_ is continually scanning, and we shall have the groundside sensors operational within the unit. Our communications are...spotty, but we have managed to maintain a consistent connection."

Noxa fell silent as they came to the primitive human lift. He sent a half dozen of his Special Operations Sangheili and the prisoners onto the lift after checking in with the rear guard he'd left topside and confirming the situation remained static. He watched the lift slowly begin to grind upwards. Noxa found himself wondering how, precisely, he had ended up here. It was a difficult thing to trace. He'd been overseeing an operation on a distant human-held moon barely ten cycles ago. He'd led his Spec Ops Sangheili on a little over a dozen successful campaigns against human settlements, killing hundreds.

And then, suddenly, three cycles ago, he'd been reassigned without warning.

But that was the nature of serving the Prophets, serving the Covenant. Even a Special Operations Commander with almost forty years experience, exemplary military service and unwavering dedication was still subject to the beck and call of the Prophets. Noxa looked up as he realized that the lift was returning.

There was much to do.

Officially, he had been tasked with discerning the true nature of this strange energy field that enshrouded the local region. He was to use any means necessary to do so. He wasn't sure why the Prophets were so obsessed with it, but it was not his place to question their motives, or their orders. The severity and weight of his task had been obvious in the fact that he had been given nearly eighty high-trailed Spec Ops personnel.

No Grunts, no Jackals, no Hunters.

This was strictly Sangheili business, which meant the Prophets wanted their best on this. So be it. He intended to see this though to the end.

Noxa had yet to fail in a mission since his Spec Ops career had begun.

As the lift settled back into place and he and the others stepped aboard, Noxa felt an unfamiliar twitch of fear. He looked back the way they'd come. Most of the area was lost to the rain-shrouded darkness, but he thought he could see a figure, a tall, thin thing among the shadows. But then it was gone.

It must be a trick of the shadows.

He and his entourage of warriors began to ascend from the rock pit.

* * *

Kane kept his eyes open as he was marched through the forest. The rain was starting to let up and sunrise shouldn't be too far off. He knew he had to pay attention to everything, gather every scrap and shred of information he could. But even as he thought this, as he looked at the dozen black-armored Elites surrounding them, he couldn't help but wonder how they would fare against the Proxies and the strange slender being.

Or how they would turn out if they, themselves, became Proxies.

Elite Proxies, now there was a terrifying thought.

But what were they doing here? Why? More importantly, how had they gotten here? He couldn't help but assume that the _Winter's Edge_ was probably in pieces now. On the ground, humans tended to go toe to toe with the Covenant, and there were typically as many wins as losses. But in the air? In space?

The Covie bastards dominated.

So now what were they going to do? It seemed like a pretty bleak situation. Then again, it had already seemed pretty damned bleak. Maybe they could use this somehow. Pit the Covenant against the Proxies and the slender man. Except...Kane looked around again. He didn't actually see any other members of the Covenant save for the Elites. And only the black-armored ones at that. Between the armor, the silence and the way they moved and held themselves, he knew that these were Spec Ops Elites.

So this must've gotten a Prophet's personal attention.

Well, it only made the whole thing more suspect. The Elites were probably here for the same reason they were: investigating the mysterious energy signal. He supposed he'd find out one way or the other, since the Covenant traditionally only kept prisoners for one reason: information. And that was rare in and of itself.

Kane tried to pay attention as they walked through the dark forest, but honestly, there wasn't really anything to see or hear. The Proxies and slender seemed to be keeping their distance for now. There was no conversation to overhear, not that he understood Elite speak, whatever the hell that was called, and there were no opportunities to escape. It seemed like, for now, he was just going to have to go with the flow.

They kept on walking.

* * *

The camp was a study in frenetic work. Dozens of Elites moved about in grim silence as they pieced together the operations facility. The structures were largely prefabricated and had already been brought down from orbit and landed in the center of the forest. Really, it was a matter of bringing everything online and setting up connecting corridors of their favored purple plate metal. Work-lights shone into the gloom, pushing back the darkness. As they approached the edge of the encampment, Noxa hesitated.

He turned and looked back the way they'd come from.

He was not one prone to flights of fancy, but Noxa could sense something out there. Some kind of presence or awareness. His senses were warning him that he was in great danger in this location, and he'd survived this long by listening to those senses. But he had a task to complete, here on direct order from a Prophet, and he would not fail in his task, even if it meant his death. Turning away from the darkness, Noxa saw that his assistant was lingering. He seemed to be engaged in conversation over a live frequency.

"Report," Noxa said as he approached.

"The prisoners are secured, their armor stripped. Our interrogator is preparing and-"

Noxa cut him off. "I will perform the interrogations."

"Yes, Commander."

"What information do we have so far on the energy signatures?" he asked, resuming his walk towards the mostly constructed command core of the base.

"Intelligence reports that there are three distinct types of energy we are dealing with, though all of them appear to originate from the same location. The energy field our probe detected initially is still blanketing the entire region, and remains centered here, near our outpost." As he said that, Noxa paused, almost to the door.

"Do have an exact reading on the precise location of the energy's point of origin?" he asked.

"Yes, Commander."

"Take me there."

"Yes, Commander." They began walking again, going around the rounded purple structure and moving around to the other side of the camp. "This energy field has grown in intensity since we originally scanned it. We currently do not know what gives it its power. The second energy signal has also grown more powerful, more intensified, and seems to be disappearing and reappearing all over the region. The final type of energy all appear to be weaker versions of the mobile signal."

"Do we have any notion if there is a pattern to these fluctuations?" Noxa asked.

"Yes. We aren't certain as to the specifics, but several times when the primary source has appeared, it has somehow created the second, weaker variety."

"Is there any indication as to what these might be at all?"

"No."

"How about the local populace? I understand that there is a human military installation nearby. Has there been any response?"

"No, Commander. Nothing on the radio. Scans indicate that the humans we captured were the only ones in the region, but the energy is interfering with our sensors."

Noxa considered all this as they finished coming to the other side of the base. He began to ask where the site was, the location of the eye of this invisible maelstrom, but suddenly, he didn't need to. He knew instinctively where it was. Although Noxa could see nothing, there was a spot perhaps fifteen feet away that looked no different from any other area in the large clearing they'd built their outpost into, and yet…

He could _feel_ it.

Noxa could feel the raw invisible energy radiating from the location, bleeding out into their reality. An icy wind blew suddenly.

Noxa resisted the urge to shiver.

"And our scouts?" he asked, still staring at the spot.

"We have four teams in the field already. They are investigating the various structures in the region. Our largest team is heading for the military outpost to secure it first."

Noxa nodded absently, still staring at the spot. He thought he could see something there...some dark flickering, and suddenly his head began to ache. He stared at the spot intently for a moment longer, then looked away from it. "I want two of the advanced scanners pointed at this spot and activated immediately. I also want this spot lit up with no less than six work-lights, and two guards posted here at all times."

"Yes, Commander."

Noxa began walking back towards the command post.

He could feel the icy presence of the energy's core at his back.

* * *

They'd been stripped of their armor and thrown into individual cells. Kane had spent the first ten minutes searching every inch of the cell, hunting for something to use, some advantage, and he knew the others were doing the same, but there was nothing. Just a floor, a ceiling and three walls of bland, shiny purple metal and one wall of buzzing energy. No windows, no vents, not even a damned bed. There was at least a weird looking toilet. Kane had taken the opportunity to take a long piss as soon as he was done searching the cell.

Kane heard a door opening and moved to the front of the cell.

They were alone. Their guards had left for the moment. They'd been brought to a hallway that was lined with six cells on either side. Goll was across from him and he could see Lara next to Goll. The Sergeant approached his energy barrier.

"Okay, Helljumpers," he said, his voice a bit rough, "standard procedure here. Give them nothing. Mouths shut, eyes open. Look any opportunity you can. We have to get out of here and the sooner, the better."

There were a string of affirmative replies. As far as prep speeches went, it was a little weak, but they all knew the score. Kane glanced over as the only door out, as far as he'd been able to see, which was directly to the left of his cell, opened up. The biggest Elite he'd ever seen in his entire life stepped into the corridor, flanked by two others. Done up head-to-toe in shiny black armor, it looked intimidating as hell.

Although…

Kane frowned, a creeping sensation of horror slipping into his guts, as he realized that the Elite was familiar. Not by its features, he had no real way of telling the alien bastards apart, but by its sheer size. He _had_ seen this big bastard before. His stomach ached suddenly. This was the same psychotic Elite that had captured him, tortured him several years ago. He was positive of it. Kane felt his whole body begin to go cold with fear.

He found himself hoping furiously that the Elite wouldn't recognize him.

The Elite pointed at Goll and snapped something in its native language. The shield was dropped and the two guards grabbed Goll and yanked him out of the cell, then dragged him out of the room. Kane watched him go, then looked over at Lara. She stared back at him, looking anxious. He suddenly wanted to be near her, to hold her, for her to hold him. But it was impossible. At least they could see each other.

Kane began to pace his cell after a bit, an awful mixture of loneliness and fear and hopelessness settling over him. He tried to keep it all at bay as he waited, thinking furiously for some way out of this situation. Time passed slowly. Goll came back, was shoved into his cell, and then Lara was taken. This process was repeated over and over until finally Kane, the last one on the list, was pulled roughly from his cell.

He studied the base as he was pulled through it.

He had to give the Elites credit: they worked fast. This obviously hadn't been here when they'd landed. The facility was still in mid-construction. They passed several silent, dark-clad Elites diligently working on bringing power online or shifting crates or building new sections of the facility. It was strange that there were no other Covenant here. Maybe they didn't trust this operation with any but the best of the best.

Finally, he was brought into a room that was empty save for a single metal chair that, Kane learned, was as uncomfortable as it looked as he was shoved roughly into it. The two Elites who had dragged him left the room, and he was left alone with the huge Elite. God, this bastard had to be nine feet tall.

"Human," it said in guttural but surprisingly clear English, "tell me why you are here." Kane remained silent, staring straight ahead. The Elite growled in irritation. He imagined that the thing must be pissed by now, as the others must not have given it anything. "I tire of this subterfuge, human. Your friends have already given me details as to the nature of your mission. Make it easier on yourself: tell me what I want to know, and I promise your death will be swift and painless. Otherwise, I have a number of methods of pain at my disposal."

Kane remained silent.

The Elite continued questioning him for about five minutes, growing increasingly frustrated. Kane kept still and silent, even though he knew all about the Elite's advanced torture techniques. He had yet to break to questioning, not that he'd exactly run into a lot of situations where he'd been questioned in his life. Typically all his battles were life or death, not life or get captured. It was clear that the Elite was becoming more and more frustrated, and its patience was wearing thin. This became extremely evident when it snapped something in Elite speak.

The two guards came back into the room and grabbed Kane, then they began hurrying back through the base. Once they were back at the cells, Kane was thrown into his and the energy shield was snapped back on.

"You humans do not seem to understand the severity of your situation," the Elite said, pacing up and down the corridor, staring in at each of them. "I don't need all of you alive. Before long I won't need any of you. So, allow me to enlighten you."

The Elite stopped abruptly and pointed. Kane couldn't tell who it had selected, but he felt a fresh layer of fear settle over him. Abruptly, the Elite stalked into one of the cells, and he heard someone shouting.

"Get the hell off of me!"

Thompson. It was Thompson.

The Elite reappeared and walked to where presumably everyone could see it. It held Thompson aloft by his neck.

Without a seconds' hesitation, it squeezed, and just like that, Thompson's neck was broken, and he was dead. Kane trembled as blinding white hot fury overtook the fear, the anxiety, the worry, blasted it away into nonexistence. It took all his effort to keep from throwing himself against the energy shield. Then he heard Diaz screaming.

If he was furious, she rendered mindless with anger.

" _Let me out of here! I'll kill you, you son of a bitch! Let me out of here! LET ME OUT OF HERE I'LL KILL YOU WITH MY BARE GODDAMNED HANDS!_ " she roared.

"Indulge her," the Elite said.

"Diaz, don't!" Goll snapped, but the woman was gone.

As soon as the shield was down, she darted out. The Elite tossed Thompson's limp corpse to the floor and turned to face Diaz. She took three running steps towards it and leaped, sailing through the air and landing one, hard blow against the Elite's right mandibles. It caused the big bastard to take a stumbled step back.

But that was it.

The Elite then reached out, wrapped one huge hand around her face, snatched her up and then bashed her skull against the floor until it cracked open and she died in a spray of blood, her broken body joining Thompson's.

This time, Kane did throw himself against the shield wall. All he got for his troubles were some shocks and a lot of pain.

"Consider breaking your silence, humans," the Elite said, then turned and strode out of the room, followed by its guards.

Kane couldn't stop staring at the two dead bodies.

He found himself wondering if things could possibly get any worse.


	13. Chapter 13: Nightfall

The day passed slowly.

Noxa spent most of it stalking around the encampment, checking up on the varied projects that were paramount in not only getting the headquarters operational, but also in unraveling the growing enigma that was this wet human forest. Currently, Noxa was on one of his long walks through the facility. There were things to check on.

As promised, the facility had been operational and online shortly after daybreak. The Sangheili under his command worked fast. He had checked out each of them on the way to this planet, looking through their careers. They were competent, certain, tested in the fires of chaos and death. It was good to be among other seasoned veterans, especially in such circumstances as these. Noxa kept it to himself, but he didn't like this assignment at all. Normally he didn't give much thought as to whether or not he _liked_ his assignments.

He did them, regardless.

A warrior did not let such things hinder him.

But there was something about this forest, this land. Besides the simple fact that there did not seem to be any inhabitants to fight, that, in fact, the only combatants they had encountered had immediately given up, (not that he could blame them, although the Imps he had faced in combat were skilled fighters, worthy of a distant kind of respect, to have fought against he and his warriors would have been foolish suicide), there was a pall over this land.

A shadow.

He had never experienced such a thing before. And he didn't like it. It was unbecoming of a warrior to have these vague, uncertain feelings of dread and anxiety. After forty years of combat, Noxa thought himself exempt from such emotions. Apparently not. Once the base was operational, he'd begun tending to the varied projects. They ranged from curious power fluctuations they'd been experiencing, to strengthening their communications and scanning abilities, to dealing with the prisoners, to mapping out the region and managing the varied scouting teams that had been sent out into the field.

It was hectic, but he kept busy.

Primarily, what he wanted to know was where those power signatures had gone to. They had disappeared. The field that blanketed the region was still there, and was still growing slowly stronger, but that was all. He wanted them found. He demanded them found. Noxa had only one more place he had to visit before returning to his office and filing his latest report. The Prophet requested them every two units.

Noxa stepped into the command center and took a small satisfaction in the way the four personnel within sat up straighter.

"Update," he said.

"Communications strength remains unchanged," one of them said.

"The energy field continues to grow in strength at the same consistency."

"Our field scouts have filed reports. They are at your terminal, commander."

They had a few more reports, but everything was unchanged. He was still letting the prisoners stew. In his head, and only there, he was disturbed. Normally he wouldn't have done something like that. Killing those two humans...he'd been angry. Furious. Disgusted. But, and this was where he was having great difficulty, he thought that the seed of his motivations in those murders had been from fear. But why?

What was he afraid of?

Noxa snapped out a few responses to the operators and left them to their work. He strode quickly through the corridors, trying to think of nothing but the mission, the objectives, frustrated that he was not out in the field with his scouts. He kept walking until he had arrived at his office, his sanctuary, starkly furnished, brilliantly lit.

There was a single window at the back of the room, behind his desk and chair. Noxa walked slowly to it. The view was intentional: the core of the storm. The spot where the energy originated from. As ordered, it now had two guards nearby, several work-lights, on even in the gray light of day, and two large pieces of scanning technology pointed directly at it, working continuously, cycling through the dozens of scanning permutations that the Covenant had at their disposal. As he stared at that spot, he felt cold.

A sudden strong paranoia swept over him, and he felt as if he were being watched. The feeling was so powerful, so intense, so certain, that he spun around, expecting to see something in the room with him. But he was alone.

Forcing these feelings away, and banishing them with only limited success, Noxa sat and began to read through the scouts' reports.

* * *

Kane thought for sure they would come back to interrogate them, but instead they'd just come back and had thrown the corpses into one of the cells. He'd paced his cell for two hours, burning off the white-hot fury that had built in him. He hadn't felt so impotent, so useless, in years. Joining up with the UNSC...one of the main reasons he'd done that was so that he could _react_ when the universe took a shit on him, so he could _do_ something.

And he could do _nothing_ from inside of this cell.

The seconds ticked by, bleeding into minutes, pooling with an agonizing lethargy into hours. They spoke little, none of them in the mood to talk. Although he could tell Goll was studying every little detail, and that calmed him some. There wasn't a whole lot to study. The Elites left them alone, which was a little surprising. He thought they'd post guards. But apparently they were doing something far more important.

They had to be here for the same reason he and his squad were.

It irritated him that he had no idea how to keep track of time. No clocks, no view outside. In all that time, he'd really only managed to gather one single piece of important intel: the Elites were having trouble with their power grid.

It might mean something.

It might mean nothing.

Kane sat down with his back against a wall after a long, long time and tried to get some sleep. If and when an opportunity presented itself, it would do to at least get some rest in. Especially after he'd been running and gunning all night.

Apparently, he was more tired than he thought.

Within two minutes, he was out.

* * *

Night was falling.

Zek 'Nosolee led his small squad through the forest, away from the abandoned human military outpost. There had been no one inside. In fact, as far as he knew, with the exception of the team of Imps they had taken prisoner, there was no one in this entire region. He'd spent the entire day with his four-person squad investigating the area, trekking through the damp woods beneath a gray sky. They'd investigated a few empty structures on the way to the outpost, meeting up with another team to perform the investigation.

They'd found nothing but empty rooms and blood.

Despite that, despite everything, through all of it, Zek couldn't shake the feeling that someone, or something, was watching him.

Watching them all.

Now, the thin gray light was dying, this alien sun was heading for the far horizon, and night would soon be upon them. Currently, he and his squad had been ordered away from the military base, towards a navigational beacon deeper in the forest, just a few minutes' journey. The Commander himself had given them a direct order: one of the mysterious energy signatures had reemerged, and it was near their location.

They were to investigate immediately.

As they stalked through the trees in the dying light, Zek found uncomfortable thoughts drifting through his mind. He was not religious by nature. Despite the fact that it was illegal to do so, he did not believe in the Great Journey. He thought that there was obviously _something_ to what the Prophets fed them, it was evidenced in the grandiose technology left behind. But he could see it for what it was: technology that was left behind by another, more advanced race. There was nothing...divine, or holy, or sacred about them.

They had died out.

No one seemed to know how though.

If you believed the Prophets, they had taken the Great Journey, and been propelled into a new realm of existence, a paradise. Where, one day, the Covenant and the faithful would follow. He saw it for what it really was: fanatic nonsense meant to placate the masses and keep everyone in line. But he spoke to none of this disbelief. To do so could result in death. Instead, his focus was primarily on his family and his honor.

What greater honor was there than to serve in a long, prestigious military career?

Though he was still relatively young, he had shot through the ranks by mastering himself and his willpower. He had entered into the military as young as possible, had catapulted through basic training and begun climbing the ranks as quickly as possible. The result of this was that he was now a member of Special Operations, a team leader, and respected among his peers. His father, who now served as an Honor Guard, was exceptionally pleased.

Though both of his parents were less than pleased that he had yet to produce offspring or take a mate.

Such were the sacrifices of an exemplary and excelled career.

Up ahead, something was shifting, moving. At that exact second, on his HUD, his motion-tracker, there was a red dot, at the edge. Zek froze, as did his squad. He already had his plasma rifle in hand. If it was another Sangheili warrior, the dot would be yellow-green. If it was a civilian: white. But no, this was red.

Meaning that it was a human military personnel. What did they say? Marine. Or perhaps an Imp that they had missed. It was possible. He made quick hand-motions for his squad to spread out and move in. He knew it would be best to take this human alive for questioning. They had yet to move. Perhaps they didn't know…

Zek stepped into a small clearing, hoping to provide an obvious distraction while his other Sangheili, equipped with cloaking, slipped in from the sides and behind. As he did this, there was a sudden shriek that sent chills through his body. He had never before heard anything like it, and he had heard a great deal.

In a furious burst of movement, something exploded through a thick collection of branches and foliage, and an uncertain figure rushed at him. Zek caught sight of the standard uniform that the Marines wore, and had just enough time to register how torn and rumpled it was, before the human slammed into him.

And he went stumbling several feet back, landing on his ass, the plasma rifle knocked from his grasp. He had never once encountered a human even remotely this strong. What was happening? The strange being uttered another shriek and leaped at him, onto him, and punched him right in his mandibles.

Blinding white light shot across his vision as he felt one of them crack.

With a furious yell, he threw the impossible human from him. It landed on its back but was already getting up. By now, his squadmates had rushed into the clearing. They tried to restrain the human, stepping on its arms, but it tore them out from under them, causing them to stumble back. Both Zek and the human leaped to their feet at roughly the same time. The human rushed him, but Zek was ready this time.

He bashed the impossible thing with his shoulder and sent it flying backwards. He heard an unexpectedly organic sound and suddenly the human was no longer moving. In the dying light, he studied the scene, and realized what had happened: the human had landed on a sharp stick attached to the trunk a tree.

The stick had gone through its skull, punching through its eye, killing it instantly. Zek resisted the urge to curse.

"Get it up. Carefully," Zek said as he activated his communicator. "This is Squad Leader 'Nosolee to Base Command."

" _Base Command responding, 'Nosolee. What information have you?"_

"I've encountered a human. A Marine. It attacked and was killed in the ensuing battle, but something was wrong with it."

" _What was wrong with it?"_

"It was several times stronger than any human I've encountered. It easily knocked me to the ground." Although he felt embarrassed to admit it, he knew that the information must be relayed, his feelings be damned. "It was able to successfully hold off my entire squad until I killed it. And..." He hesitated, staring at the body.

" _And? Report, Squad Leader."_

"There's also something wrong with its eyes. There's a strange darkness enshrouding them. Also, the human didn't seem...sane. It appeared feral, as though it had lost its mind."

" _Understood. Wait."_ There was a pause. Zek looked around, realizing that something was wrong. Almost at once, he had it. One of his squadmates was missing.

"Where's Zuka?" he asked. The other two looked around. Grez was holding the body now, an unhappy look on his face. Zek didn't blame him.

"I have not seen him," Grez reported.

"Voro?"

"I'm sorry Squad Leader, I lost track of him right before the attack."

Where was he? Zek turned in a slow circle, looking into the darkness. "Zuka!" he called. "Report! Immediately!"

Silence mocked him.

The return of the operator made him jump. _"_ _Squad Leader, you are to bring the body back to base immediately."_

"I understand, Base Command, but I have a new problem I must attend to."

" _What is your problem?"_

"One of my squadmates has gone missing. I'm sending back one of my men with the body. I must find my lost squadmate."

There was a pause. _"_ _Understood, Squad Leader. Tell your man to make haste."_

"Yes, Base Command." Zek turned to Grez. "Grez, take the body back as fast as you can. Then, if they do not have an immediate use for you, meet back up with myself and Voro. We must find Zuka," he said.

"Yes, Squad Leader," Grez said, turning and disappearing into the forest.

Zek frowned, staring into the gathering darkness, and began his hunt.


	14. Chapter 14: Escape

"Kane, get up!"

Kane jerked awake, scrambling to his feet, fear and adrenaline pounding through his system. His vision was blurry and his head hurt. A lot of him hurt. For just a second, one cold-gut second, he forgot where he was and, seeing the horribly familiar purple metal walls around him, the glowing, humming energy field, he thought he was back in the clutches of that huge Elite. But he calmed as he looked across the way and saw Goll in the next cell.

Although he _was_ back in the clutches of that big Elite.

But he wasn't alone this time, and the big bastard seemed busy.

"Yes, Sergeant?" he asked, blinking rapidly, trying to get a handle on the situation.

"Power's getting screwy again, be ready. We might get a chance to escape."

"Got it," he said, finally coming back online. Waking up fast was kind of a prerequisite for going into the military.

Well, and continuing being in the military.

"How long was I out?" he asked.

"A few hours. It's almost nightfall again," Goll replied.

"How can you tell?" Lara asked.

Goll shrugged. "I've got a good internal clock. Could be off by about an hour or two, though," he replied.

Kane began to say something, but a low hum rolled through the base and the lights dimmed noticeably. He felt his heart skitter in excitement. This might be his chance to escape. All their chances. It would be a hard fight out, really dangerous, but hopefully the Elites were going to be busy enough dealing with their own problems-

The hum of power suddenly rose in intensity, and then something sparked inside of his cell. He held up one hand, shielding his face, not losing focus on the energy shield. It was a damned good thing, too, because it suddenly snapped out of existence. He flung himself at it, knowing the risk. If the thing turned back on while any part of him was still in the way, he'd lose that part of himself. Well, at least it would be cauterized instantly. Kane felt a hot buzz of energy at his back and felt his right foot twitch briefly.

But no explosion of pain.

He'd made it through. Glancing back, he saw the energy shield had snapped back into place. Looking down, he realized that a little section of the heel of his boot had been chopped off. It was still smoking, the black piece of material on the other side, back in the cell.

"Kane," Goll said, and he looked around, and realized that no one else had gotten out. "Get out of here, find the generator and kill it. Then get to the ranger station."

"No, I'll come back after I've-"

"That's an order! One of us has to get out. If none of us make it, get to the military base, find a way to contact...someone. Go! Now!" he snapped.

Kane hesitated, but only for a few seconds. "Yes, Sergeant," he said, and hurried over to the only other door in the room. It lit up and slid open as he approached. He'd never liked that aspect of this tech, though the ships he traveled on had similar doors…

Focus!

There was a hallway outside of the door. He was at a T junction. Purple metal corridors snaked away to his left and right, and dead ahead. While his mind whirled and he tried to remember the general layout of the base, or what he'd seen of it when they were being walked through it, and tried to determine where his gear might be, because he was going to need it, his decision was made for him. He heard voices coming from the right and saw a shadow of movement ahead of him. Okay then, he was going left, apparently.

Kane turned and sprinted left.

A wave of darkness rolled through the base as another power fluctuation occurred. What the hell was going on? Didn't matter. He was going to complete his objective. Kane reached the end of the corridor, trying to stay in the dead center, so he didn't trip any doors. The voices were getting closer behind him. As he prepared to hurry down the next hallway, he stepped too close and opened a door ahead of him. He suppressed the urge to curse, and then suppressed the urge to thank his dumb luck, because he saw some ODST armor sitting on a table.

Hurrying into the room, the door closed behind him and he was alone. What passed for tables among the Covenant lined the walls and three of them took up most of the open space in the center of the room. Lots of ODST armor was scattered there, weapons too. Kane worked as fast as he could, finding his own armor in a pile by itself for whatever reason. He pulled it on, dividing his attention between the armor and the door. Another shroud of darkness descended briefly on the base. This one lasted for almost five seconds.

Maybe he wouldn't even need to blow the generator.

Not that he'd actually skip out on that.

Kane got into his armor and secured his helmet. He had the suit run a quick self-diagnostic as he hunted around for guns and ammo. He grabbed his shotgun and pistol, unable to locate the SMG and unwilling to steal anyone else's. After making sure they were loaded up and he'd gotten a fair amount of ammo for the journey ahead, he scavenged some explosives from Ross's suit. "Sorry, pal, but I need these," he muttered as he pocketed it all.

His suit diagnostic came back. It wasn't peachy keen, but it was going to have to do for now. Kane waited, listening, pistol in hand now, wondering how the hell he was going to do this. As he considered this, he glanced back across the room again out of reflexive paranoia and his gaze fell on something near the back of it.

He blinked in surprise, at his own stupidity, and hurried across the room. There was Covenant gear here, too, and not just plasma rifles and needlers. There was a stealth unit and a row of energy knifes laid out on one table.

"Holy shit," he whispered.

For once, something ridiculously useful had fallen right into his goddamned lap. He holstered the pistol and grabbed the stealth unit. He'd used them before, had made sure he knew how to use them, and checked it over.

"Damn," he muttered. Okay, maybe not a miracle. The charge was at less than a quarter. And these things weren't quite known for their energy efficiency. He attached it to his suit and did a very quick check, to make sure it worked. He hoped it wasn't back here because it was both low on power _and_ on the fritz. The first knife was dead, so were all the others save for one. He activated it and a six-inch blade of white plasma sprang into existence. Perfect. It had about half of its charge left. He killed the blade but kept it in hand.

As he moved back to the door, he stopped and thought about his goal for a moment. It wouldn't do to just run out there. He had to be smart about this. What he needed was a map of the base. But where was he going to find that? He couldn't wait too long. With a sigh, he realized that he was going to _have_ to do some wandering, there was no way around it. He almost left the room before _another_ thing occurred to him.

At least he had a quick solution to this one.

Elites, definitely Spec Ops Elites, had motion trackers. They'd be able to tell there was an enemy moving around the base immediately. He grabbed the stealth unit again and spent a moment re-configuring it.

"There," he muttered, reattaching it and then activating it. The thing would mask his signal and he'd appear as a friendly on the radars. It wasn't perfect, but it would do. Once he was decently sure there were no Elites out there, Kane left the room and slipped back out into the corridor. He didn't hear anyone around.

Kane moved quickly and silently through the base, picking up snatches of conversation as he moved down the snarl of purple corridors. He only knew some basic phrases from the Elite language. He'd heard rumors that R&D were cooking up a standardized translation unit, which would really help, but it wasn't going to help him right now. Kane turned a corner and froze as a door opened up somewhere behind him.

Nowhere to go.

He pressed himself up against the nearest wall, careful not to let his armor clink. He heard the guttural voices of a pair of Elites.

They were coming closer.

He held his breath as they came around the corner he'd just passed and jogged past him. He caught their word for power and what might have been the equivalent of generator. Well, that was good enough for him. They seemed like they were in a hurry. He waited until they were a fair distance away and then began moving after them. His luck held out and they led him out of the base. As he stepped out, he saw that Goll had been right, night was falling. He felt a shiver of apprehension. _It_ was out there, that slender thing.

And its Proxies.

Were there Elite Proxies now?

Kane focused, tightening his grip on the energy blade. This was going to have to be fast. There was a lot more shouting now that they were outside. As they hurried along the exterior of the base, him just a peripheral shadow, they came around a corner and something caught his eye. How could it not? There was a spot off to his right that was lit up like crazy. There were half a dozen work-lights that were bright as hell pointed towards one area. He started wondering what was so special about that spot, but then he saw it.

There was a faint purple shaft of light emanating from that spot. If it was faint, how could he see it with all the overwhelming Covenant lights? Kane didn't know, but there it was, clear as day: a shaft, almost a beam, of light shooting up into the sky. Purple, but darker than the Covenant's favorite color, and somehow fundamentally different. Looking at it hurt his head. He looked away, in the opposite direction, and saw that they were passing a window that looked right out onto the spot. He felt a bolt of black frozen fear as he spotted the huge Elite behind the window, staring out it. For a few seconds, he thought the bastard was looking right at him.

But no, it turned around, looking away again, and Kane made himself keep going.

A few moments later, they had finally led him to the generator: a large, blocky purple device nestled between three walls of the base. It was smoking. Kane began to launch his attack, it was dangerous as hell but if he did it fast, really fast and well, he could take them both out. Well, probably. But that's when there was a muffled sound, a weird sound that he'd heard described before but has never had the possibility to actually hear.

Something about displaced air, that's all he remembered.

This was that sound, because it was the sound of something abruptly popping into existence where there had been nothing but air before.

And the Slender Man, (it was at that moment that Kane knew this thing needed capital letters in his mind's eye), was there before the three of them.

It definitely had no face. There was only the vague shape of a skull, as if it had some taut white cloth pulled over it. It wasn't actually wearing a suit. He had that impression earlier, but really that was just the way the color of it looked. Up close, it had a strange, almost liquid, quality to it. Not incorporeal, but amorphous.

And there _were_ tentacles, definitely.

It certainly had very long arms and legs, (it had to be eight or nine feet tall, maybe even taller), but there were squirming tentacles sprouting from its torso. The two Elites shouted in surprise, but before they could retaliate or run or do anything, one of Slender's arms shot out and wrapped tightly around the first Elite's throat. As it lifted the Elite like it weighed nothing at all, four tentacles coming from its chest area suddenly thinned out, becoming no larger around than Kane's forefinger, and shot through the second Elite's chest.

Armor and all.

It was over in seconds, though the second Elite, he could see in his hyper-aware state, was still alive. _Saving it for later,_ he found himself thinking frantically. The Slender Man turned and looked right at him then. How something with no eyes looked at something that was functionally invisible, Kane had no idea.

But _it was looking right at him_.

Blind terror kept him frozen, rooted to his current position as though he were a statue. Without looking away, the Slender Man (it was not a man but that's what his mind forced out) raised its other hand and punched straight through the generator, ripping through it like it was freaking tissue paper. Right as the lights began to fail and the area was plunged into darkness, the Slender Man popped back out of existence.

Kane wasn't sure how long he stood there, but something finally got his ass moving, and he turned around and sprinted away, into the woods.

Towards the ranger's station.

* * *

Noxa was have a difficult time controlling his temper.

It was his success, he'd decided after about two units of receiving bad news. He had been successful for so long that he'd grown used to things going his way. Or, even when they didn't go his way, (it seemed rare in the past few years), he could adapt to them. Turn them to his benefit even, on occasion.

But what was happening here was different.

The base had been undergoing power fluctuations and surges ever since the sun had begun to burn for the far horizon. Not that there'd been much sun today. Then things had begun to spiral out of control. The energy field had suddenly spiked in power. At the same time, the strange signals had returned, the big, powerful one and the little ones. There were a lot of them, it seemed. He had immediately tried to send his scouts to the locations of these signals, but, along with everything else, communications were failing.

To make matters even worse, they had lost contact with the _Righteous Fury_.

The Prophet, he imagined, would not be pleased.

And then the primary reactor core had died suddenly not all that long ago. As he stalked through the base, relying on his helmet and its low-light amplification abilities to navigate the dark corridors. Just before the power had gone out, he had received a report: the scout carrying the strange human corpse had arrived and the body was in the infirmary.

Noxa intended to see this corpse for himself.

He cursed sharply as the lights suddenly came back on, overwhelming his vision. It deactivated automatically, but the effect was still the same. He stood still, waiting for his vision to come back. When it did, he saw a dimly-lit corridor ahead of him. The infirmary was nearby. He strode quickly through the base until he came to it.

A pair of Sangheili medics stood over an examination table holding the body in question. The scout who had brought it in stood back, his armor stained with dark gore. The medics were taking the filthy human's armor and clothing off.

Noxa had seen several humans in his life. Thousands, probably. He'd killed nearly as many, either himself or by proxy, and none he had come across had looked like this. As they disrobed the ugly alien, he saw that its skin had a sallow, waxy pallor to it, and it was extremely pale. Its face was pulled into a strange sneer. He remembered the scout's words that had been relayed to him, that this human had seemed...feral.

Insane.

The expression looked as such.

And the eye. There was just one remaining, the other a bloody socket of gore. But the one that remained looked as though it had been ringed by some dark, corrosive substance. Except when he leaned in closer to examine, (the medics stepping back, giving him space), he saw that it was nothing that had been applied.

It was part of the skin.

"I want an autopsy preformed immediately," he said, then turned to the scout. "Grez," he said, he'd memorized every name, face, and rank, "return to your squad. Communications are unstable at this moment. Relay this order: I want one of these captured alive."

"Yes, Commander!" Grez snapped.

"You may go."

He turned and hurried out of the room. As he did, another warrior replaced him. "Commander...the prisoners have escaped."

Noxa resisted the sudden strong urge to shoot the warrior who had brought him the news. He'd been known to do it in the past, when he was younger. But no. Control was all important. And every one of these warriors had his respect.

"Recapture them...wait," he said, and the warrior stopped from leaving. "Capture one. Once we have one of them, kill the others."

"Yes, Commander."

Noxa returned his gaze to the strange human corpse.

He still maintained control of this situation, and he would complete his objectives.

Nothing would stand in his way.


	15. Chapter 15: Whispers in the Dark

The ranger's station was just as messy and gloomy as he remembered from their initial meeting here. Perhaps more so, now. Or maybe that was just his bad mood and the fact that he was alone and afraid. His trip through the darkening forest had been harrowing, as he'd been constantly looking over his shoulder, hunting for either Elites or the Slender Man or his damned Proxies. Although he was convinced he was being shadowed, he hadn't actually seen or heard anyone. It was full dark, the moon and the stars hidden behind a thick, seemingly perpetual cloud cover by the time he'd finally gotten to the abandoned building.

He'd used his flashlight as sparingly as possible on the way there, but it was almost pitch black out. He again uselessly lamented the lack of his VISR function and finally relented when he almost tripped over something twice. Turning on his light, he'd hunted down a lamp, righted it, and had turned it on.

Now, here he stood, looking out the shattered windows occasionally, hunting for signs of life on either side of the line. He saw nothing. He'd been here about ten minutes now and his mind was beginning to wander, to drift into dark waters. With a sigh, Kane walked over to one corner of the room that was mostly hidden by a desk scattered with office supplies and sat down with his back to the wall. It was about as decent a hiding spot as he was going to get. No sense standing by the windows, back-lit by that damned lamp, a target for anyone with a gun and some willpower. No, he'd hide here and wait for someone to show up.

And in the meantime, he thought.

He was exhausted, which meant it was harder to keep the darker thoughts at bay. He was worried about Goll and Lara and Ross. He mourned Diaz and Thompson and Hux. God, three of them were dead now, one of them he'd had to help murder. He regretted that he hadn't run into that big Elite, because he would have killed it. Probably for the best, Kane would've taken a long time with that knife he'd found.

He thought of the faceless Slender Man and his dark Proxies and fought an urge to get up and patrol the perimeter.

Kane heard something outside, froze, listened intently. It could have just been the wind, but...he held his breath.

 _There_.

Footfalls, very quiet, almost perfectly silent. He was tempted to use the stealth unit, get up and investigate, but he made himself wait. He hadn't used it once since leaving the base, and he was going to hold onto it for as long as possible. A moment passed and the quality of the footsteps changed. They were louder. A board creaked. Someone was definitely coming up the stairs and trying to be quiet about it. He held his shotgun tightly, wishing he still had his SMG, finger on the trigger. He also wished he had a damned motion tracker.

The door opened, who or whatever it was, came in.

A long, tense moment passed.

"Identify yourself." Kane felt relief wash through him. It was Goll.

"Coming out," Kane replied, and slowly stood up. "How'd you know where I was?"

"I didn't, but I could sense someone was in here," Goll replied.

"Freaky. Where's everyone else?"

"I got separated from them when the power went out, last I saw, Hendrix and Ross were both in good condition. We managed to at least get our gear back before we split up. Good job on the generator, by the way."

"I'd love to take credit," Kane replied.

"It wasn't you?" Goll asked.

Kane shook his head as he came out from behind the desk and joined the Sergeant in the middle of the ruined station. "It was the Slender Man."

Goll frowned. "Why?" he murmured.

"I have no idea. Popped into existence, killed one of the two Elites that were there, punched a hole in the generator, and took the other Elite. I left after that."

"This just keeps getting weirder and weirder."

"Yeah. What's the plan, Sergeant?"

"I've got one, but I want to wait until the others get here before going over it."

Kane nodded. There didn't seem to be a lot else to say. He moved slowly around the cabin, looking for something useful, ammo maybe, information. His relief at not being alone was immense, and again he felt ashamed at that. He'd spent so long just getting over it, getting over his problems, his feelings, that he thought he'd kind of...gotten over them. Not necessarily that he was ultra brave now, more that he was apathetic.

But this place...this situation…

It was like reopening an old wound, and all those bad feelings were bleeding out. Kane shoved away his thoughts and his feelings and just focused on the mission. Goll had a plan, he had to, it was his job. And once the others got here, they would enact that plan. They would move forward, onward. It was what ODSTs did.

It took another ten or so minutes before Ross showed up, and then, just as he was seriously beginning to worry, Lara arrived out of the pitch black woods. He watched her the entire time she approached the station, worried that something would run out of the woods after her, or the Slender Man would teleport in and snap her up and she'd be gone. Just like Hux. It was obvious that that's what had happened.

But she arrived, safe.

This time, she came over and stood next to him, took his hand in hers and squeezed. He squeezed back. "All right, everyone's here," Goll said, garnering their attention. "Right now, our top priority is to get back in contact with...someone. We don't know if the _Winter's Edge_ is still there or not. We need more information and, if possible, help. At the very least we need to report this mess. The best way we can accomplish this, I believe, is to get to the military base and see if they had a communications booster. I give it a fifty-fifty chance they have one. So we find the booster, install it, call for help, figure this shit out. Questions?"

They shook their heads.

"Good, then let's go. We've got a dangerous walk ahead of us."

* * *

"Report."

Zek stared at the two squads standing before him. It had been a hectic time. He'd been hunting for Zuka and Grez had since made it back from delivering the strange corpse to help in the search. But there had been nothing so far. No sign of the missing Sangheili. They'd connected with a second squad, who had helped them with their search, but they had a problem of their own: they had a missing teammate as well.

He'd sent them out to cover the immediate area over a unit ago and they'd agreed to meet back at the clearing where he'd initially killed the strange human. As he listened to all of the others tell him that they had failed in their task, he realized one was missing. Grez. He activated his radio. "Grez, where are you? Report."

When Grez responded, he was whispering. _"Squad Leader, I believe I've found another one of the strange humans. I'm tracking it."_

"Where are you?" Zek replied immediately, making quick hand gestures to the others. Grez reported his position. He wasn't far. "Keep tracking it, we're coming to you."

There were standing orders now: capture one of them alive. He didn't want to leave his brethren behind, but duty came first. He led the black-armored Sangheili through the dark, wet forest, quick and quiet. The forest felt alive around them, alive and writhing with a malignant darkness. A sickness, invisible, odorless, but somehow felt. He shook the uncomfortable feeling off to the best of his ability as he approached Grez's position.

Within a few moments, they were there. They found the Sangheili warrior crouched, just behind a treeline, staring into a clearing. Something was moving in it, and he could hear muttering. Zek and the others gathered at optimum ambush points. Six Sangheili warriors for a single human would typically be absolute overkill.

But this was no normal human.

Still, Zek felt confident. He waited for the best moment, and then gave the order to attack. They sprung from their positions. This time, it went a lot better. Although in spite of overwhelming numbers and strength, the strange human still managed to throw two of them against trees, break another's lower left mandible, and hit Zek in the head hard enough that he felt his helmet crack. But it went down. They managed to shackle its wrists and ankles, binding them together with reinforced cuffs. And they'd socked it in the face more than once.

Still, beaten and bound, the bizarre human still writhed on the ground, trying furiously to break free of its bonds. And this one wasn't even a soldier, or so it appeared. It seemed like it might be a civilian. Its clothing was unfamiliar to him, but it didn't look like any kind uniform. "Take it back to the command center," Zek said. This time, he sent two members of the other squad back, just in case. He activated his radio.

"Command, this is Squad Leader 'Nosolee."

" _Acknowledge, Squad Leader. We have new orders for you."_

"Before I receive them, I must report that we have captured a live altered human. Two operatives are bringing it back to the command center as we speak."

" _Excellent."_ The radio operator sounded unusually relieved. Zek almost asked about it, but then his mind summoned an answer for him: Noxa. The base commander had seemed very irritable almost since the beginning of this operation.

Perhaps a live specimen would sooth his frayed nerves.

" _Your orders are as follows: Investigate Grid Eight. Contact has been lost with the squad in that region. Discover their whereabouts."_

"Understood, command."

Zek gathered the others and updated them on the situation, then set off into the darkness.

* * *

The military base loomed ahead of them, a beacon in the darkness.

Goll had told them to assume it was under Elite control, and he was right. The lights were on, punching vast holes in the darkness, the perimeter of the outpost lit up. He could see two dark figures on the rooftop, patrolling around, and the main entrance was guarded by another two. The remnants of Squad Echo Seven gathered at the edge of treeline that surrounded the structure. They waited, studying the situation.

"Okay," Goll whispered, "this is what we do. We need to take this base, kill them all. There can't be _that_ many of them down here. From what I've seen, this is exclusively a Spec Ops operation. I haven't seen a single Grunt, Jackal, or Hunter. Based on what I know, they probably won't commit more than forty or fifty Elites to this. Granted, all of them will be extremely well-trained, but this is a great opportunity to take out several of them. Kane..." He hesitated, turned to look at him, and suddenly Kane knew what he was going to ask.

"You want me to solo this," he murmured.

"I'm sorry, but they have motion trackers, I can almost guarantee it. That cloaking device of yours not only renders you invisible, but makes you show up friendly. Any of us would be stopped before we got inside the perimeter. And you have that knife."

Kane nodded, already considering the situation. He'd been trained in stealth. He could do this. He'd have to be fast, and lucky, but he could do it. He sighed. "All right. Stay here. I'll let you know when it's done."

"Good luck, Kane."

He nodded, looked at Lara, wished he could say something, wished he could say a lot, but there was no time. She just nodded tightly to him, and he nodded back. It was time to kill. Kane was glad he'd saved the stealth unit. Checking it over, he saw it had maybe a fifth of a full bar left. He made sure it was attached and functional, then began to make his way along the perimeter. No way he was walking in through the front door.

He hunted down a rear exit. It was unguarded, but it wasn't open. He moved carefully through a hole in the fence, (there were a lot of them), and quickly approached the door. He had some basic hacking skills, something he'd always intended to work on, but he didn't seem to really have a mind for it. After several minutes of failure, he finally gave up and went hunting for a window. The first two he found were intact, but the third, leading into someone's bedroom, was broken open, the remaining shards smeared with blood.

He moved carefully inside.

Moving over to the door, Kane listened intently. He could hear nothing. He got to the door, opened it, waited. Nothing moved in the corridor beyond. Only darkness awaited him, though it was not absolute. Slipping out, he could see that while the lights were out in the corridor, through the door at the end of it, some light spilled in. He moved silently down the corridor, trying to compromise between moving too fast and moving too slow. He had to do this quickly, he didn't know how long the stealth unit would hold out.

But move too fast and he'd probably end up dead.

Kane hit the end of the corridor and peered out through the open doorway. Nothing. He was still alone, though he could hear voices now. Deep and guttural. He listened as he crept closer. He didn't know much Elite speak, but he knew enough to pick up that weird shit was going on, some of their men were missing, and they didn't like it. Well, at least they were having trouble with the Slender Man as well. Although that might not be a good thing. Elite Proxies were something he genuinely did not want to come up against.

They were strong enough as it was normally.

He found his first Elite in the garage. It was looking through the wreckage, and they'd apparently already taken the corpses he and Lara had produced earlier. The dark bloodstains were still obvious, though. The Elite hardly took notice when he slipped into the room and as he began talking casually, perhaps asking a question without paying attention, mistaking him for another Elite, Kane managed to get close enough that he leaped onto the bastards back and stabbed it three times in the neck with the plasma knife.

It died with hardly a fuss, though there was a lot of that dark purple blood.

From there, it was relatively easy to clear out the base. All in all, there were only nine Elites moving about. He used the blade twice more, used his pistol on the rest. Although their shields would normally protect them, they only activated in response to high velocity rounds. They didn't get a chance to activate if you put the barrel of your pistol against the back of their head and fired off three rounds.

All in all, it took him twenty minutes to get the job done. Unfortunately, right after he finished, his stealth unit gave up the ghost. He hung into it anyway, in case he found a way to recharge it. When he was sure that they were clear, he gave the all-clear, and Goll and the others quickly came to join him. "Come on, we have to find that booster, we probably don't have much time before someone realizes that they aren't in control of this outpost any longer," Goll said.

"They might or they might not. I overheard some of them talking. Sounds like they're having a lot of problems, as well," Kane replied as they headed off.

"Best to err on the side of caution," Goll said. "We should get to the basement, that's more than likely where the booster is going to be."

They made for the basement.

* * *

Noxa stalked through his base, trying to temper his fury.

At this point, he felt confident that this was the most disastrous mission he had ever been on. Either as a subordinate or a superior. Over half of his warriors were dead or missing. The base was running on auxiliary power. They had lost all contact with their vessel in orbit and had not been able to determine if it was still there or not. The reports that were coming in from the scouting teams he had left were that they were running into increasingly difficult to deal with enemies, and more of them. Someone had begun calling them Surrogates. He didn't know who or why, but the name had stuck for everyone else.

And now, one of those Surrogates had been captured alive.

They were doing studies on it, which basically consisted of an autopsy being done while the thing was still alive.

He'd done similar things in the past.

There was nothing quite like cutting into a live, awake specimen.

Noxa stepped into the infirmary. What he saw made him pause. Even after all he had seen, this was a bit much. The specimen was affixed firmly to an examination table. There was a great deal of blood, although it was much darker than usual. Its stomach and chest had been neatly sliced open. Its ribcage had been cracked open and separated, exposing its strange organs and innards. In spite of these facts, the strange thing twitched and spasmed.

It was still alive.

The two medical operatives he'd assigned to its examination were both across the room, studying screens. He didn't blame them. Even with all he'd seen and done, there was something deeply disquieting about the scene.

"What have you learned?" he asked.

"Base commander," one of them said as he turned around, seemingly startled. "Our discoveries are...disturbing. We've been able to determine that its muscle mass is far more dense than most humans, and certain portions of its brain seem to be simply shut down, including the pain center and anything relating to memories. We have also been able to prove conclusively that these things, these Surrogates, are directly related to the energy field. It seems to be having some kind of influence on them, controlling them, reworking their bodies. There also appears to be extensive nerve damage. We have several more tests planned."

"I see," Noxa murmured. "Have you been able to communicate with it in any fashion?"

"No. It seems bestial in nature. Completely feral. We can't tell for sure, but our brain scan seems to indicate it is not capable of comprehending language. Even its own."

Noxa walked over to the Surrogate and stared down at the hideously cut open thing. It stared back at him with eyes of obsidian, flat and hard and dead.

"Continue your research," Noxa said, then turned and left abruptly. He tried to clear his mind as he walked quickly back to his office. He liked being in there. He felt like he had some measure of control, of agency, over this operation when he was there. Perhaps it was an illusion, probably it was, but he needed to get things done.

When he arrived back at his office, he saw that there were two reports waiting in his terminal. The first was mildly disturbing: the energy buildup in the region, specifically around the headquarters themselves, was growing stronger at a much more rapid pace. The second item was truly horrifying. One of the scouts had managed to capture an image of what was now known to be the most powerful of the mobile energy sources.

Noxa wasn't sure what he was seeing, but knew it turned his guts cold.

It was shaped like a human, but horribly elongated. Tall, in dark clothing. Its face, or lack thereof, was a blank, flat expanse of white. It stood among the trees, the dark forest its habitat, and seemed to somehow be staring not just at the camera, but through it. At Noxa, as though it were somehow aware of him studying the photo.

Noxa turned off his terminal and turned to look out the window.

The core of the energy signature was pulsing a dark purple now.


	16. Chapter 16: Collapse

Noxa refrained from growling in mounting frustration as he stalked through his failing base. He had stumbled upon a minor mystery. It had merely pecked at his mind at first, hardly noticed. But as time passed and he discovered that running, or even maintaining, this operation was getting more difficult, the mystery grew. Eventually, he decided that he needed a break, even a small one. His tasks were tantamount to trying to squeeze blood from a stone. So he marched towards the command center, intent on information.

The picture of the strange being he had seen, Noxa did not know its origin. He'd checked out the information that was tagged with the photo. Typically, it was stamped with a date/time index, basic location, and the name of the operative who had taken it. But when he'd gone looking for this information, he had found it strangely blank. He'd dug through the database inasmuch as he could from his own private terminal, and finally decided to go see what the operatives in the control center had to say about it.

He could have called them, done this remotely, but he wanted to walk.

There was a lot going wrong just now, and Noxa had to clear his head. He stepped into the command center and saw the three operatives there hard at work. He'd had to send the other into the field, as many of his teams were missing. He walked over to one of them and, once he had time, explained the situation to the operative. Noxa watched the warrior work, sorting through information. He glanced around the command center and suddenly wondered if he was going to be able to salvage this operation.

"The only relevant piece of information I can pull from the database is the time with which it appeared in the database. And the fact that it did indeed appear, it was not transmitted, should be impossible, and yet, there it is," the operative explained.

He had called up the image.

Noxa stared at it intently. A mystery indeed.

"You may resume your work," he said, and left the command center.

* * *

Zek stopped as he and his squad cleared the treeline. Dark purple blood spattered his black armor, almost blending in, though it was already being washed away. They had finally found Zuka. He had been insane, his eyes like pools of deep space, driven to madness in whatever method it had been done to the humans.

His former ally had come after them with a feral intensity, a relentless determination that spoke of singular focus.

He had been exceptionally difficult to put down.

He looked back at the body that Grez and one of the other scouts were dragging. They were bringing their dead ally to a drop-off point so that another team could retrieve him. He wondered what they were going to do with the body. He was also deeply curious as to what had happened to Zuka, how he had been transformed into this abomination. It had been a long night so far, and he had an idea it was only going to get longer.

Zek activated his comms. "This is Squad Leader 'Nosolee to Base Command."

The response took several seconds. _"This is Base Command."_ The operator sounded harried and irritable.

"We've brought the body to the appropriate coordinates and are ready for our next task," Zek replied.

There was a longer pause. _"Understood. Attempt contact with the personnel at the human military station. We have not been able to raise them. If you as well fail to raise them, head directly for the station and investigate."_

"Understood," Zek responded, but Base Command had already cut the link. Sighing, Zek attempted to raise the Sangheili stationed at the human outpost, as he had memorized all of the various squads' frequency numbers. He tried three times and each time was mocked with the silence of an open channel.

"Come," he called to the others, and set off.

* * *

"Found it!" Lara called.

Kane felt his heart jerk in his chest and a cold bolt of fear shoot through him. They'd been working in near silence for ten minutes now and her shouting like that had about scared the crap out of him. He abandoned his hunt through the variety of crates he'd been pulling open. They'd been down there in the basement for what felt like too long now. Surely it wouldn't be much longer before the Sangheili figured out something was up. He wished he could believe his previous assessment that they'd be too busy, but he could feel apprehension welling within him. Kane headed out of the small side room he'd been hunting through.

Coming back into the main antechamber of the outpost's basement, he saw Lara coming out of another room with a crate in her hand. Goll and Ross came out of other rooms. Kane glanced at the far side of the room, opposite the entrance. There was a large door that was shut to them, the words **SERVICE TUNNEL** scrawled over it.

"Where does that lead?" he murmured.

"No idea," Goll replied. "Come on, we have to hurry."

He had a point. Kane led the way, shotgun tucked tight against his shoulder. Anyone or anything could have entered the base since they'd come down here. Maybe one of them should have stayed up and stood guard. They were getting sloppy. He'd been on longer assignments than this, much longer, but being terrified for so long was flat-out exhausting. They moved quickly through the base, double-checking the area, and had to waste another five minutes ensuring that they were still alone. And they were, for now.

They found an access ladder to the roof in one of the maintenance rooms and Kane went up it first, taking point as he almost always did. He opened the hatch and hauled himself up and out. Outside, it was still raining and very dark. The base punched holes in that vast darkness. He moved along the roof, scouting the area beyond the base's perimeter as Lara and Goll quickly assembled the booster. Well, as quickly as they could manage.

Kane started to get antsy quickly. He could see nothing out there, but that didn't mean there _was_ nothing out there. And how was he supposed to feel secure when there was an enemy that literally teleported? He still wasn't even sure how that was possible, or what the Slender Man was. In fact, not for the first time, he thought with certainty that he would never find out, even if he managed to survive this wretched mess.

It took ten minutes to assemble the device, and then another five to install it. Kane felt the increasing press of time. They moved back down the ladder and through the base, then gathered in the control room.

"Okay," Lara murmured as she began firing up the controls for the communications console. "Hopefully we can reach the _Winter's Edge_ now, or someone." After a few minutes, she sat back, gestured to Goll. "It's on."

Goll linked the local comms with his suit and tried calling out to their ship. Kane waited in terse silence, keeping watch on the door with Ross. The longer it went on, the harder it was to wait for a response. After about two minutes, Goll suddenly got one. Kane heard it, as he had his own radio open and tuned as well, but it was so faint that it was almost nonexistent. Despite that, through the static-riddled fuzz, he heard the words 'Winter's Edge _'_. And then the signal vanished. Goll growled in frustration.

"What's wrong with it?" he asked.

Lara shook her head as she studied the controls. "Nothing," she said. "It's doing what it's supposed to do, it just can't cut through the interference created by the energy signature that's blanketing the region."

"Great," Goll muttered. "Well, at least we know the _Winter's Edge_ is still there." That alone had lifted a great burden from Kane, and from the way he said it, and the others visibly relaxed, he could tell they felt the same way.

"So now what?" Kane asked.

Goll was staring at the floor now, clearly thinking. Something suddenly sparked in his eyes. "The Covenant," he said, looking up at Kane. "The Spec Ops Elites should have brought a comms booster with them. If we can get it, I should be able to rig it up here. They have more powerful equipment than we do."

"Well...I guess it's better than no plan," Kane murmured.

Goll nodded. "Let's go."

They left the control room and hurried through the base. Kane could feel his fear and paranoia lowering to much more tolerable levels as they came into the main hallway. Although it didn't help when he looked at that damned painting or drawing or whatever it was, about Slender Man and his Proxies.

Right about the time they were approaching the end of that tunnel, Kane caught sight of movement. There were Elites coming towards them, half a dozen of them. Goll raised his fist, freezing them. He began to give an order, and then everything fell apart. A bolt from a Covenant Carbine seared towards them, narrowly missing Kane's head. Kane returned fire uselessly with his shotgun. Goll hurled a grenade.

"Service tunnel!" he called.

They beat a hasty retreat as the grenade went off.

* * *

Zek let up on the plasma rifle. "After them!" he called.

As he watched the dark shapes of his fellow Sangheili warriors race into the gaping maw of the tunnel, he knew now what had happened to the others stationed here. The humans must have killed them. He had to admit, begrudgingly, that they were exceptionally resourceful. He'd heard the report that they had escaped confinement during a power outage at the base, and had hoped to be the one to find them.

Surely that would look good in the report.

However, it was not to be. Before they could even get a quarter of the way down the entry tunnel, his radio came to life. _"All squads! Return to base! We are under attack! Return to base immediately!"_ The operated sounded genuinely panicked.

"Let's go!" Zek roared.

As the others began coming back towards him, he turned around. And froze.

What appeared to be a very tall human with no face, ( _but it's not a human, is it?_ His mind whispered to him), suddenly stood before him. How had it approached so unseen? What was it doing now? It was...unfolding.

Like a dark, malignant flower.

Evil radiated off of the thing.

Slender black tentacles slithered into the air out of its body. Before Zek or any of the other Sangheili could do anything, react in any fashion, the tentacles shot forward and ensnared them all. Zek began to scream.

It ceased abruptly as the entire group disappeared into thin air.

* * *

The service tunnel seemed to go on for a mile.

Kane had been positive they were screwed. He'd nearly taken a shot through the chest when he'd been falling back, laying down cover fire. He was sure the Elites would follow them down into the service tunnel, which turned out to be not very large, and gun them down. They'd encountered very few doors, all of them leading to little side rooms, most of which were empty, some of which served as storage for crates that obviously hadn't seen any attention for a long time, none of which led to exits. But they remained alone.

The Elites never followed.

They'd traveled in near darkness for a long time before finally, after what seemed like ages, the tunnel came to an end. For a brief but paralyzing second, Kane thought that the tunnel had dead-ended. But there was a door and Goll got it open. They moved silently single-file up a narrow stairwell of instacrete. The next door led them to a low instacrete tunnel, similar to the one that served as entryway into the military outpost.

"Where are we?" Ross murmured.

"Not sure. Scout the area. Kane, Hendrix, take the left. Meet back here in five minutes," Goll replied quietly.

The two of them gave clipped replies and headed off to the left, down the darkened tunnel. The place was suffused in a dull glow, the lights set to their lowest setting. The fear was close now, threatening to become a full-blown terror as he and Lara quickly checked out the doors they came across. Kane fought for control. The first door revealed a generic storage room packed with gray crates, all of them labeled with a variety of tech talk. The second had nothing to show but walls covered in control panels and terminals.

He still had no idea where they were, this could be anywhere. Or maybe that was just his confused brain, but so many of the places he tended to hang around looked like this. Storage rooms, rooms with technology for walls, dark, dank corridors. They came at last to what appeared to be a control room with a handful of workstations spread across a floor of pitted, discolored metal deckplates. Lara took a seat at the largest control.

"We don't have much time," he murmured.

"I know. I just want to figure out where we are," she replied.

A moment later, they had their answer and the two of them were hurrying back through the dim tunnel. They regrouped with Goll and Ross.

"We're at the local power station," Lara reported.

"Perfect," Goll replied. "That's not all that far from the Covenant camp. Did you run into anyone?" he asked as he turned back around and began leading them out the way he and Ross had originally gone.

"No, no one and nothing," Kane replied.

"For the best, I suppose."

Kane knew what he meant. At this point, he was almost completely convinced that, outside of his squadmates, there was not a single friendly thing alive in this entire forest. He checked over his shotgun as they found the entrance to the power station and left it. Fully loaded, in working condition, with a good amount of shells in store.

"How the hell are we going to get into the base?" Kane asked as they moved past the perimeter fence of the power station and began jogging into the forest.

"I'm not-" He paused. Kane realized at once why: he could hear conflict. Roars of orders and pain from the Elites, the distinctive sounds of plasma rifles and carbines being fired off. The occasional detonation of a plasma grenade. And he could actually see this, too. Brilliant blue and white flares and pulses of light.

"What's happening?" Kane murmured.

"The Proxies, they must be attacking," Goll replied. "This is perfect. Stay low and move fast. Stick together. I've got a half-decent idea of where this thing should be. I'll need some time to get it out but it's not that big. Understood?"

They responded affirmative.

The ODSTs descended into chaos.

It was exceptionally difficult not to open fire as they rushed out of the treeline towards the nearest entrance. Their entrance went unnoticed, for the most part. Kane fought the urge to blast away with his shotgun as he ran full tilt across the hard-packed ground. A handful of Elites were doing their best to hold their own against twice their number in human and Elite Proxies. Good, let them keep occupied. Goll hit the door and had it open quickly. The four of them slipped into the room beyond. Goll took a moment to orient himself, then selected one of the three corridors that snaked away from the entryway and jogged onward.

The purplish walls of the Covenant base's interior flashed by them as they ran through the base, stopping only occasionally as Goll found his way. As he followed, keeping a tight grip on his weapon and a sharp eye out, Kane had just enough time to think that there was no real time to think, and he was deeply grateful for that. Acting was a lot easier than thinking. Acting on something was reality, thinking about something was all theoretical, and that's when your mind chose to let you in on all the ways the situation could go wrong.

"Hold," Goll whispered harshly, and opened up one of two dozen doors they'd come across. He slipped inside. "It's here! Watch my back!"

Kane had a chance to look into the room, mainly to determine if there were any other entrances. There weren't. All he saw was a bulky piece of alien tech taking up the center of the room. He left Goll to it, taking up a defensive position with Lara and Ross. The sounds of battle were intensifying outside. He wondered who would come out alive. Well, either way, it was thinning out their numbers at least. Although how far did the Slender Man's reach extend? He remembered from studying the map of the region that this forest was pretty isolated. There really wasn't anything beyond the rough perimeter of the forest itself for a good ten or fifteen miles in any direction. But what were fifteen miles to a thing that could teleport at will?

How far could the monster teleport?

How in the hell were they going to deal with this?

He honestly had no idea. How do you kill an enemy you can't shoot? Can't even hit? He supposed, if it came down to it, they might just bomb the whole area. A FURY tac-nuke would take care of it. Well...maybe. Could the Slender Man stand up to a nuke? He really didn't want to find out, but he was honestly stumped otherwise.

"Got it," Goll said, reappearing several minutes later with a small but heavy-looking device tucked beneath his right arm. "Let's get the hell out of here."

They almost made it.

When they came back out the way they'd come in, the fighting had only gotten worse. There were more Elites over here now, and a lot more Proxies. The four of them made a break for the treeline. All they had to do was get back to the outpost, probably be easier to hit the service tunnel again, move unseen. Then they could install-

" _Damn!_ "

Kane turned, frozen fear stealing into him, suffusing his entire body. It was Ross. He'd almost never heard the man raise his voice in just that way, and now he saw why. There was a brilliant blue-white flare coming from him.

Ross had been stuck with a plasma grenade and it had already fused to his armor.

A trio of Spec Ops Elites were coming after them. "Keep going!" Ross screamed, and before any of them could say anything, turned around and sprinted back towards the three Elites hounding them. They all disappeared in a tremendous blue-white flash that only grew in power as the Elites' own grenades touched off as well.

Kane found himself staring at the spot where Ross had last been until Goll yanked him almost off his feet and screamed for him to get moving.

And, in the end, he did the only thing he could do.

He kept going.

* * *

All was lost.

Noxa stood among a field of corpses on both sides of the conflict, a plasma sword in hand. It was close to extinguishing. The attack had come out of nowhere, from all sides. They had at least had a little bit of warning, because of their tracking system, but even so, it should not have been possible for them to have been surrounded the base as quickly as they had. But only a fool argued with reality. He'd rallied his army, calling back every single unit to the base, and had gone out to lead the defense. He thought it was still possible to salvage the situation.

But it was not.

He hadn't realized this until perhaps five minutes ago.

Noxa drove the blade of his plasma sword into the chest of a human Surrogate, picked it up with the sword, raising it high into the sky and then threw it to the ground. As he spun, preparing to attack another one of the godless bastards, intent to take down as many of them as possible with him, he realized they were no longer attacking him.

Breathing heavily, Noxa moved slowly in a circle.

He was surrounded. Surrogates on all sides, a silent army, looming in the darkness, staring at him with pitiless obsidian eyes.

He knew, somehow, what they were waiting for.

"Face me!" he roared.

The Faceless One appeared before him.

And then Noxa knew, and was, no more.

* * *

Kane didn't realize it, but he was holding his breath.

"I repeat, this is Sergeant Goll of Echo Seven to _Winter's Edge_ , do you copy? Over."

They'd managed to get back to the military outpost and get the Covenant comms booster installed without any hassle. Apparently, all the Proxies were still busy at the Covenant camp. He truly hoped that they had wiped each other out, though he doubted it. He couldn't stop thinking about Ross. Seeing the way his stocky, armored frame had disappeared in a pulse of blue-white light. Couldn't stop hearing him screaming for them to keep going.

They were just three, now.

" _This is the_ Winter's Edge _, we hear you Sergeant Goll. Over."_

Kane let out his breath in one long exhalation that briefly fogged his visor. "Oh thank God," Goll murmured. "What's happening up there? Over."

A new voice came onto the line. _"Sergeant, this is Captain Harper. How about we trade information? I'll catch you up to speed first,"_ he said. Kane listened intently. They all did. _"We were driven off by a Covenant cruiser. Tenacious bastards. They didn't pursue us, so we managed to hide on the other side of the planet. We got in touch with the nearest UNSC cruiser, who happened to be quite close, on patrol. We rendezvoused with the ship and attacked the Covenant carrier. It's in pieces right now and we're presently holding a steady orbit over you. Now why don't you tell me what in the hell's been going on down there?"_

Goll immediately reported their situation, from the landing up to now, hitting all the key parts and crucial pieces of information. Kane was standing behind Lara now, as she sat at the comms console, his hands on her armored shoulders. She rested her helmeted head against his chest. He wished, suddenly, that they didn't have this armor on, just for a moment.

" _Well...that's a hell of a story,"_ Harper murmured after a little bit. A burst of static rolled over the line, causing the three of them to tense. _"I have to keep this short. They're telling me that the energy field is interfering with comms. In not too long, we won't be able to communicate at all. We've managed to get in touch with ONI and I pulled a little bit of information out of them. That satellite data core you found, do you still have it?"_

"Yes," Goll replied. Kane had practically forgotten about it.

" _Good. You're going to need it. Apparently, it was tracking the energy signature as it was initially building. Based on what they told me and on what you've told me, and our own scans over the past several hours, this is the best working theory we've got: there was a noticeable decrease in the energy field just within the past hour. I believe this is the primary reason we're even able to talk now. This seems to coincide with the attack at the Covenant camp, where several of this Slender Man's Proxies were killed._

" _It stands to reason that these are giving it its power. Kill the Proxies and take away its power, and it should be vulnerable then."_

"And then what?" Goll asked.

" _Based on what ONI told me, there is enough of a similarity between this energy signature and some technology that the Covenant use that one could affect the other, theoretically. Since the Covenant built their camp around the point of origin of this energy field, if it was weakened enough, you should theoretically be able to set of an explosion at the camp and collapse the point of origin,"_ Harper explained.

"That's a lot of 'theoreticallys'," Goll muttered.

" _I know. Unfortunately, due to the nature of this threat, we have to enact a quarantine over the site. We can't send anyone else down. It's too dangerous. And...if you haven't managed to report back in twelve hours, then I have been ordered to drop a few tac-nukes on the site,"_ Harper reported reluctantly.

Kane almost laughed.

"Great," Goll replied. "Understood, Captain Harper. We'll get back to you within twelve hours. Over."

" _Understood, Sergeant. Good luck. Out."_

Goll sighed heavily, looked at Lara, then at Kane. He pulled the satellite's data core out of one armored pocket.

"Let's get this over with."


	17. Chapter 17: Power

**PART THREE  
** _–ENTERING ISOLATION–_

* * *

"Is it working?" Goll asked.

Kane was feeling sick as he watched Lara work the controls in determined silence. The last half hour passed in tight tension. They'd worked to secure the facility as much as possible, install the data core that Goll had harvested from the satellite, and stock up for the road ahead. It was going to be a long, miserable road that necessitated a great deal of guns and ammo. On the one hand, he was pretty happy to have such a straightforward objective: kill a lot of things and then blow some stuff up. He could handle that.

On the other hand, the job required him to head into the rainy darkness with a teleporting, faceless horror of an enemy. That was bad enough. But the job also required that one of them stayed behind at the outpost, to coordinated them. The device, now hooked into the outpost's scanning devices, painted an accurate, almost up-to-the-second picture of the region and all the relative positions of each of the energy signatures.

AKA, the Proxies.

Unfortunately, there wasn't a way to pipe the feed to their suits, even as NAV points. The data was too complex and they just didn't have the technology. And he was _not_ looking forward to leaving her here. He knew she could take care of herself, there was no question about that, but he still hated the idea. He could feel disaster looming somewhere nearby. It could be his own fear, or that strange pall of anxiety and slow horror that had permeated this entire region since the beginning, but he wasn't sure. It felt worse, deeper somehow.

He was ignoring it to the best of his ability.

They had a job to do.

"It's working," Lara confirmed.

The screen in front of her lit up, showing a topographical map of the region. There were several bright lights strung out along its length. Most of them were clustered together. They stared at the screen together for several seconds in cold silence.

"So what, exactly, is the plan?" Lara asked.

Goll began to respond, and then everything in the entire room went dead. Kane jerked in a kind of primal response, looking around blindly, convinced that the Slender Man was now in the room with them, his tentacles creeping out into the air like blood in the water, reaching for them...but before he could get his flashlight on, there was a low hum and the emergency power kicked in. The light was considerably less powerful, but it was light.

"Shit," Lara whispered.

"What?" Goll asked, worried.

"There's not enough power to work the scanners. Even if I could reroute what power we have, there wouldn't be enough," she explained.

"Shit," Kane whispered.

"This base must be drawing power from that plant we went to through the service tunnel. Hendrix, stay here and secure the base. Kane, with me. We're getting that power plant back online, and then...we're just going to have to do this and hope for the best."

"Yes, Sergeant," they both replied.

There were a dozen things that could go wrong, a hundred things. Doing _anything_ and keeping _anything_ safe seemed impossible when faced with an opponent like the Slender Man. But what was the alternative?

He looked at Lara. She looked back, locking his eyes with hers.

Then he followed Goll out of the room.

* * *

The service tunnel was just as haunting as he remembered.

As they jogged down the dim tunnel, (it was even darker than before), he thought that Goll might try to tell him something reassuring, but the Sergeant remained silent. Perhaps saving his breath, but Kane knew the real reason the man was silent. There was a good chance that they were going to die, and die horribly, and Goll knew that, and wasn't going to bullshit him. He hadn't so far. This was a bad situation.

They were going to be extremely lucky to come out of it alive.

Goll ran past one of the dozens of shadowy niches that and Kane heard something shift. Internal alarms flared right as his forward momentum carried him past the same niche and he had just begun to turn as a dark figured leaped out and smashed into him. It issued a wild shriek and he saw stars as an explosion of pain blossomed within his skull as his helmet, and his head, slammed against a pitted instacrete wall.

He heard a shotgun blast and dark blood splattered across his visor as he smashed to the floor. A gloved hand was thrust in front of him and he took it. "They're getting smarter," Goll grunted as he pulled Kane to his feet.

"Yep," he growled in response, his head aching fiercely now.

"Come on, we have to keep going."

They managed to make it to the power plant without incident, but Kane was deeply unhappy to find that the plant was pitch black. He flipped on his flashlight. "Search the area, quick and quiet," Goll whispered.

"On it," Kane replied tightly.

They each took the same directions they'd originally taken, the first time they had come here. As he started moving down the dark corridor, he dialed up Lara on the radio, hoping he could reach her. "Lara, you there? Over."

" _Here,"_ she replied. _"What's happening? Over."_

"Nothing much. Power plant is totally dark. We're scoping the situation. What about you? Anything on your end? Over."

She sighed. _"Nothing. Good news, I guess. I'm currently looking for backups in case the power plant is as screwed as it seemed. I think I'm onto something. Over."_

Kane thought he heard something as he stepped into the main control room. "Have to go," he said, and cut the link.

He stepped slowly into the control room and played the flashlight across the room. Beyond the windows, there was only the forest and rainy darkness, lit briefly by stark flashes of lightning. Had he actually heard anything? Kane was concerned that he was actually getting to the point of tension and fear and exhaustion that he might be getting false impressions. The control seemed clear. He began to do a more thorough search, but his radio crackled to life.

" _The reactor is a no-go. Over,"_ Goll said to both Kane and Lara.

"Damn," Kane growled, turning and leaving the control room, moving to link up with Goll.

" _Well, that sucks, but we do have an alternative. Over,"_ Lara replied.

"What? Over," Goll asked.

" _There's a protocol here for just this situation. In the event of power loss, the UNSC set up alternative power lines to other large generators in the area. One should be enough. The nearest one is in the quarry. Get there. Over."_

" _Kane, meet me at the front. Over,"_ Goll said.

"Dammit, I wish we had a car. This is taking too long. Over."

" _I thought about that, too,"_ Lara said. _"I found a tracking system. They lo-jacked all their vehicles. Diagnostics reads a single vehicle still functional. It's...maybe two kliks from your current location. Here...I'm uploading a nav marker to your HUDs. Over."_

A small upside down neon green triangle appeared in his field of vision with **1.9km** over it. He made it to the front entrance, finding Goll standing there, staring out into the rain. "We'll get right on it, Hendrix. Any activity of there? Over."

" _Nothing so far. Over."_

"Good. Stay sharp. Out." He turned to regard Kane, his face grim and pale behind the rain-streaked visor of his helmet. "Let's get it done."

They began jogging into the darkness.

* * *

They managed to make it to the vehicle without running into any horrors, and that only made Kane jumpier. He could feel the tension ratcheting up with every step. It turned out to be a Warthog, carrier class. Too bad about that. A freaking LAAG would've been great. Goll hopped into the driver's seat, Kane in the passenger's. The vehicle started up first try and although it was slow going initially, as it had been abandoned well off the road, in the middle of the woods, they managed to hit a road before too long and began making great time.

Kane felt misery slowly bubbling up and out from the darker corners of his psyche. He was unable to keep the thoughts away. Thompson. Ross. Hux. Diaz. They were all dead. He hadn't been with them for years, but when you were an ODST, fighting a never-ending war, months might as well have been years. You packed a lot of living into months. And they were gone forever. Just like that. Would Goll survive the night?

Would Lara?

Kane wasn't entirely sure what he would do if she didn't. Without fully realizing it, he'd very much opened himself to her the night before last. It was probably stupid, but that was life. You took risks, you put yourself out there, you looked for love.

Or you were as good as dead already.

Kane didn't want to go back to the quarry. Both times he'd been there it hadn't gone that well. And it was just a scary place. But, five minutes later, they were there, at the entrance to the quarry. They parked not far from the public restroom he and Hux had investigated yesterday. The lift was still there. Waiting for them. Silently, he and Goll got out and hurried through the light rain. They stepped onto the lift and began to descend.

Below, like an abyss, the quarry beckoned.

"Think we can win this one, Sergeant?" Kane asked after several seconds, because he felt like he had to say _something_.

"Technically," Goll replied. "Provided there's a lotta luck on our side."

"Never much been one for luck...good luck, anyway," Kane muttered.

"I know how you feel."

The lift finished its descent, coming to rest in its dark, metal nest. Kane flipped on his flashlight and stepped off the lift, onto the rocky ground.

"Where's their primary generator?" Goll asked.

"I'm actually not too sure," Kane replied.

"Let's find it then."

"Foreman's office will probably be good to start with."

They set off into the gloom. Rainwater streaked down Kane's visor as he relentlessly hunted the seething shadows that loomed around them. He found his mind turning to the Slender Man, this mysterious entity, this impossible thing. Where had it come from? From the very little intelligence he'd gathered on the subject, he had an idea that it had come through...a portal? There was that nexus, the core of the energy field blanketing the region. The same as the Slender Man and its Proxies. So it came through a portal?

Based on that tenuous assumption, that begged the next question: how? Or, better yet, from where? Perhaps most disturbing: Why?

Why did it look the way it did? Why did it resemble a human man with no face? Was it just a projection? Or was it a shapeshifter? It seemed to be, with that ability to grow tentacles. Was it from another dimension? That seemed probably the most likely assumption...or that was just the sci-fi he'd read growing up speaking. It could be from the future, he supposed. Or hell, from the past. He had no freaking clue.

But what did it _want_?

To make Proxies, obviously. But why? Did it want conquest? Control? Was it doing this just for fun? Profit? Compulsion? Was it even alive? What if it was some kind of...robot, operating on programming? He didn't think so, his guts told him that whatever it was, it was alive and sentient and downright _evil_.

Then again, he supposed it was possible that there was, in theory, a sufficiently advanced level of technology that could produce such a thing. Would it be a robot then? Or alive? Did it matter? He supposed it didn't. Whatever it was, wherever it had come from, whatever its reasoning was, he was going to try as hard as possible to kill it. Because it was far, far too dangerous to let live. Kane realized they were at the foreman's office.

For the third (and hopefully final) time, he hustled up the wet steps and into the messy room. They quickly cleared the area, then tracked down a map of the immediate region.

"There," Goll murmured, pointing. "Okay, good. It's just across on the other side, back a bit. Hope to God it's not messed up like the other one."

They hurried back out into the rain and began running towards the primary generator. Was this a fruitless effort? What was to stop the Slender Man from teleporting into this generator and destroying it as soon as they rerouted it? Then again, what was to stop it from teleporting right in front of them and straight up murdering them? Or turning them into Proxies? Until he was proven otherwise, Kane was going to operate under the assumption that they could do this. And he was going to keep trying until he died or won.

There were really no alternatives.

The primary generator was a dark, inert brick of wet metal. The front door was closed, and Kane took that as a good sign. Goll led the way, hustling up a short set of steps, his boots clanging hollowly. Kane was right behind him.

Goll opened the door. "Oh _shi-_ " he began, and then Kane felt an explosion of pain as Goll was physically thrown into it and the two of them went flying. They sailed through the air and slammed into the ground, detonating another eruption of pain that wracked his entire body, driving the breath from his lungs. Gasping for air, groping for his shotgun, (it had gone flying from his hands), he tried to see what had hit them.

A Proxy, obviously. Except…

Except this Proxy was _enormous_. It was a beast, a behemoth. It stood atop the stairwell, staring down at them, breathing heavily, cloaked in darkness.

Lightning flared, briefly.

Kane caught sight of an Elite in black armor with pitiless, flinty obsidian eyes.

And then it was coming for them, roaring as it leaped off the stairs and hit the ground with a heavy, resounding crash that sent rocks flying everywhere. Kane rolled away as Goll scrambled to his feet. Had to find his goddamned shotgun. He heard the silenced rattling of Goll's SMG and the Elite roared once again.

 _There_.

His shotgun. Kane scrambled for it, crawling across the rain-soaked ground. As he reached for, a fresh explosion of pain blossomed within him as the Elite kicked in the ribs hard enough to pick him up and flip him over once. He landed with a pained grunt, the air again expelled from his lungs. Forgetting the shotgun for now, he ripped out his pistol and rolled over onto his back. The Elite Proxy loomed above him, a malignant shadow creature. He opened fire, squeezing the trigger as fast as he could, punching holes in it.

But none of the shots were doing enough damage.

It reached for him, heedless of the bullets slamming into it.

Suddenly, Goll leaped onto its back and drove his knife into its neck, stabbing it over and over again, as fast as he could. Dark blood spurted out across Kane's armor. Now that the thing was distracted, Kane went for his shotgun again. This time he grabbed it, rolled over, aimed, and fired. The shell connected with the Elite Proxy's knee and blew its lower leg off. The thing roared furiously, though it came out as a kind of gurgling sound in a spray of blood, and both it and Goll toppled heavily to the ground.

Kane got up as fast as he could manage, hurting all over now.

The Proxy wasn't moving anymore. Goll picked himself up.

"Damn," he grunted, then kicked the Elite. It remained still. There didn't seem to be anything else to say, so they headed into the generator building and cleared it out. _That's two,_ Kane found himself thinking as they hunted down the primary console and brought it online. How many more Proxies were out there? Kane listened to Lara feed Goll instructions for hitting the override. Within two minutes, they had the power rerouted.

" _It worked!"_ Lara called.

"Perfect," Goll replied. They left headed out of the generator building, locking it up to the best of their ability, and then hurried back across the quarry to the elevator. "Now that we're in business, how about you give some intel? Where are the two biggest clusters? Over."

" _Um...I see there's a smattering of them at a restaurant and a warehouse that are practically next door to each other, and I also see a collection of them at a sawmill and some of the surrounding resort cabins...there's also a fair amount at an old UNSC bunker. All the others are singles, spread out across the forest. Over."_

Goll was silent as they rode the lift back up. "We should split up," he said finally.

"Who gets the car?" Kane replied. "Should we rock-paper-scissors for it?"

Goll snorted unexpectedly. "I'm pulling rank. Getting too old for all this crap. Need to rest my back for a bit," he replied. "Lara, how far is the restaurant from the quarry? Over."

" _Um...about half a klik. Over."_

"And the sawmill? Over."

" _About three kliks. Over."_

"Okay. Give me the nav marker for the sawmill, and Kane the nav marker for the restaurant, and both of us the marker for the bunker. Over."

" _Affirmative."_ There was a pause. Two nav markers appeared. Well, half a klik wasn't so bad. _"There you are. Over."_

"Thanks, Hendrix." Goll paused as they approached the car. "Okay, Kane, hoof it to the restaurant and the warehouse. Clear them out. I'll get to the sawmill and cabins and do the same. Then we'll meet at the bunker, clear it out, and figure out where to go from there. Questions?" There were none. "Okay, keep an eye out for us Lara. Out."

" _Good luck,"_ she replied.

Kane and Goll parted ways, and began heading once more into the darkness.


	18. Chapter 18: The Hunt

He was moving fast now, as fast as he could manage, because there wasn't exactly a whole lot of point in going slow and stealthy by now. The Slender Man and its army of Proxies knew where they were, and surely knew that they had the upper hand. Why they didn't just swoop in, or teleport in, and kill him, Lara, and Goll, he had no idea. Well, okay, he had the uncomfortable idea that they were just toying with the survivors, but hoped it was something else, like they were busy elsewhere. But busy with what?

Lara had confirmed, miserably, that they were the only living things, even counting the Elites, in the entire region.

Just the three of them.

She'd also managed to boost the power to the scanner and screw around with the settings enough to refine it a bit, and had managed to get them a more accurate reading. As of right now, there were about two dozen Proxies to deal with. God, two dozen. And the Slender Man. He was, at last sighting, over on the far end of the forest, opposite the outpost, doing God knew what. But Kane had dealt with more enemies before, more than just two dozen. Not all at once, obviously, and rarely by himself, but he'd done it.

He could do it here.

He _had_ to do it here, because as much faith as he had in those tac-nukes...in the darker recesses of his soul he just didn't believe that they could stop the Slender Man on their own. Though maybe they could if it was weak enough.

The nav marker was closing in on fifty meters. He was getting close. Resisting the urge to open up his comm channel and talk with Lara or even Goll, because hearing another human voice would go a long way right now, he pushed on, making for the treeline up ahead, the last barrier between himself and this nest of Proxies he was going to clear out. Within seconds, he was there, at the treeline, and found himself looking at a structure.

The restaurant.

And, behind it, looming like a silent monolithic sentinel in the night: the warehouse.

He wasn't looking forward to entering either of these buildings. Okay, well, maybe the restaurant. He was starving. Kane made his way forward. One foot in front of the other. No other way to do it. The front windows of the building were mostly smashed in. As he stopped to stand in front of it and pointed the shotgun inward, using its flashlight to light up the blackened interior, he wondered what it must have been like.

How had the Slender Man gotten these people? Had it done the job itself? Probably at first, it had to. No Proxies to do its dirty work. Didn't matter, he figured, marching on. He pushed in through the front door, moving the powerful white beam slowly across the smashed interior. There were tables and chairs, in various states of destruction, scattered across the floor. Spilled flood and drink, discarded silverware and cups and plates everywhere. He saw two doors over to the right, bathrooms, and two more at the back, behind the counter. Kitchen, probably. There didn't seem to be anyone in the main area, so he checked the bathrooms first.

Kane pushed the door open as carefully as he could, as it was a civilian swing model. It creaked loudly and he winced, but nothing happened. Stepping in, he wished vainly for a well-lit environment. What he wouldn't give for power and light. He'd probably be sleeping with the lights on for a few months after this. He moved into the bathroom, just wanting to get this over with. He checked the immediate area, saw nothing but a smashed mirror and a dead body off in one corner. He wondered what had happened to the poor bastard.

He stepped up to the first of four stalls and pushed it open.

Nothing.

He moved down the line to the second one.

Also empty.

Kane tried to ignore the tension he felt mounting in his musculature. He checked the third stall, listening intently, trying to hear over his own heartbeat, pounding in his ears. The third stall was just as empty as the first two. Okay, so far, so good. Kane used his shotgun to open the last door, almost positive something would be waiting for him in there, some dark figure, ready to leap, shrieking, at a seconds' notice.

It was empty, too.

Kane let out a long sigh. Okay, that was over with-

A sound overhead. Pure, mindless reflex: Kane jerked his shotgun up and fired. He had just a second to see a pallid gray face staring down at him through an open tiling in the ceiling with eyes of obsidian before its face disappeared in a plume of dark gore that rained down through the opening, spattering his visor. Even before he'd fully reacted to that, he heard the bathroom door burst open, smashing into the wall so hard it shattered tiles, and a wild shrieking sound came to him. He jerked the shotgun down, aimed, and fired.

Just missed.

The muzzle flare lit up the bathroom, including the face of the Proxy. It had once been a female Marine, her camo fatigues tattered and bloodstained, her eyes as black and unforgiving as every other monster he'd come across tonight. Then the Proxy had crossed the distance between them and slammed into him with all the force of a Pelican dropship. Kane slammed into the wall hard enough to shatter tile, just like the bathroom door, and he screamed, partially in pain, mostly in rage. This was starting to piss him off.

He shoved the Proxy off of him as hard as he could and sent it stumbling. It tripped on something, fell onto its back. Before it could get up, he leaped forward, wrapped both gloved hands around the former human's head, brought it up and then slammed it as hard as he could into the tile. Did it again. And again. And twice more until something cracked and dark blood oozed thickly out into a slowly widening pool.

Breathing heavily, his fury slowly abating, Kane stumbled to his feet, retrieved his shotgun, and secured the rest of the building. _Two more down_ was all he kept thinking as he checked out the second bathroom, found it empty, moved on to the kitchen, then through a small storage room and a manager's office, and secured the building. No one else in here, at least. Kane began to head out of the restaurant, intent on taking on the warehouse, but abruptly realized that if he didn't sit down for like five minutes and grab a bite to eat, he was going to completely and utterly lose it. He supposed, as he hunted fervently through the kitchen and manager's office for crucial supplies, that that was the true terror of freaking out.

You had no idea when it was going to happen, and whether or not you were in a position to deal with it was a total flip of the coin. He just happened to be lucky enough to be alone, relatively safe, and in a good location for it. He managed to find several grab-bags of chips, a few bottles of water, a six-pack of Mountain Dew Prime, a can of black beans, and two cans of assorted fruits. It would have to do, because although there were who knew how many packages of frozen food stored away around him, he had no way of heating it up.

Plus, the power was out, though he didn't think enough time had gone by to send anything over. But who cared. He moved into the manager's office, which had no windows and only one door, took off his helmet and set it down next to the shotgun on the desk, then spent the next ten minutes tearing into the food. He drained all three bottles of water, just to keep hydrated, and then tore through the meal and drained four of the six can of Mountain Dew, and then, praise be to the glorious luck of the universe, he found a pack of cigs.

In all the chaos, he'd lost his, though he still had his lighter.

And by God, they were Yeheyuans!

He lit up and just sat there smoking, then pulled on his helmet and opened up the visor. He activated the radio. "Lara, how's it going over there? Over."

" _Good. I've been refining the scanners. Just saw you take out two of them. I think it's actually working. The intensity of the signal has weakened, just a little bit. Over."_

"Excellent. Where's the Slender Jerk? Over."

" _Near the quarry, far as I can tell. Over."_

"How many do I have around me? Over."

" _Three in the warehouse. Over."_

"Okay. I've gotta get back to it. Out."

He finished smoking the first cigarette and had to work not to light up a second one. It was going to have to do, he'd have to focus. Kane tucked the mostly full pack of cigs away in a more secure pocket, then double-checked his shotgun, topping it off. Then it was back to work. He left the restaurant and jogged the distance between it and the warehouse. He wanted to get this over with, reconnect with Goll, and wipe these monsters out. Although he felt, deep in his soul, that he wasn't getting out of this alive.

But so long as he could take the Slender Man down with him, then that would be enough.

He moved in through the entrance of the warehouse. It was just as dark as the restaurant. His steps echoed out as he moved slowly into the cavernous room, lonely and haunting. Kane stood stock still in front of the entrance, just a few feet inside the building, listening intently, opening his senses. After several seconds, he heard something, a quiet mutter, followed by a foot scraping across the floor. They were here, and surely they knew he was too.

What's worse, most of the warehouse was taken up by stacks of crates and huge shelves. All of it organized, no doubt, in a maze-like pattern. Kane set off. He had to use his flashlight, there was no way around that, so they were going to see him coming. He moved into the maze, first walking the length of the three long, huge shelves packed with stuff that provided its outer edge along this side, until he found a way in.

He paused at the entrance of the industrial maze and listened. Breathing, somewhere nearby, heavy and uneven, a little raspy. Yes, at least one of them was definitely in here. He shouldered his shotgun and moved in. The interior of the maze was claustrophobic and miserable. He moved down the first length of passageway, pausing and listening every few feet, and came to the first turn. Making it, he peered down the left tunnel, then right.

Something flashed by farther on down the right tunnel.

Kane hurried after it, just wanting to kill these awful things. He jogged until he reached another junction, looked left, and saw the Proxy waiting there, pouncing for him. But he was ready. He jerked back and the Proxy, another human, a civilian, crashed into the solid wall of crates to his right. Kane tracked the body, aimed carefully, and fired. The shell tore most of its head off. He heard running footsteps behind him and, even before the first body had finished falling, spun, aimed, and fired. Lucky shot if there ever was one.

The shell caught it in the chest and blew a solid portion of it out, producing a fist-sized hole where its heart should have been. That put it down for good. _Two more down,_ Kane thought and listened, waiting for the third one. But he heard nothing. Then, suddenly, something dropped, something metal and loud, slamming to the floor. It came from deeper within. It was waiting for him. Kane pressed on, moving left, then right, taking whichever direction he could to get deeper into the strange confusion of alcoves and passages.

Kane tried to hold onto the anger he'd felt earlier, the fury, but it was wearing off, slowly being eroded by cold terror. This was a bad place, this whole damned forest was a bad place. If and when they succeeded, he was positive that if _anywhere_ could be called haunted, it would be Blackmore Forest. He fed a few more shells into his shotgun and came at last to the center of the industrial maze. It was an open area, scattered with a few empty crates.

Somehow, he felt that whatever Proxy lurked here, it would meet him in this location. And he was right.

Kane caught movement off his peripheral and looked up, then felt fear freeze his veins. It was an Elite. Another Elite Proxy. God. He jerked his shotgun up and fired, but the Elite Proxy was already moving. It leaped straight for him, and he barely managed to get out from under it before it crashed into the floor, shaking the whole area. The Elite Proxy had to weigh over four hundred pounds. The monster reached easily over eight feet. It backhanded him almost casually as he scrambled to his feet and he was sent flying.

He grunted and barked in pain as his back hit a solid wall of crates and he slammed to the floor. The Elite was on him in an instant. It wrapped one huge hand around his neck and easily lifted him up off the floor. His shotgun was gone. Only one thing sprang to mind as he stared into the face of pitiless horror, centimeters from death. He wrapped his hand around his pistol, ripped it out, aimed and blasted off as many rounds as he could into the thing's face. It barely had a chance to roar as the rounds punched through its skull, its brain, and out the back again. Kane was released from its grasp and barely rolled out from beneath its falling corpse.

Gasping and coughing, he stumbled yet again to his feet, feeling the various pains and aches assaulting his body. Damn, something was going to end up broken if he kept getting slammed into the walls like this. He retrieved his shotgun and got back in touch with Lara, hurrying back out of the maze, just wanting to be outside again.

"Lara, anything near me? Over."

" _Um...no. Nothing. You got them. Are you okay? You sound bad. Over."_

"Fine. Just fine. Sergeant, how are you doing? Over."

" _Fine, Kane. I've mopped up the bastards here. Meet me at that bunker, quick as you can. We'll wrap that one up and figure out where to go from there. Hendrix, how many more of these things are there? Over."_

Kane was at the entrance now, feeling an immense relief as he stepped back out into the rainy darkness.

" _Fourteen,"_ she replied. _"Not including the big one. And it's looking like six of them are at the bunker...it's probably a trap. Over."_

" _I know. But we've got to deal with it anyway. See you there, Kane. Out."_

Kane looked at the nav marker, a neon glow in the darkness before him, staring at it silently. Then, willing his body to work, he ran off into the forest yet again.


	19. Chapter 19: Terror

The bunker turned out to be worse than it sounded.

As he came at last through the trees and the dark rain, Kane found himself staring at a squat, instacrete structure. Caught in the white glare of the Warthog's headlights, it almost looked like a tick, hunkered down, head buried in the earth, leeching off the land itself. Goll stood just inside the entrance, which was nothing more than an empty square cut into the instacrete. Kane jogged up to join him, getting in out of the rain.

"You got a cig on you, Kane?" Goll asked.

Kane hesitated, then nodded. "Yeah. Found a pack."

"Spare one? I could use a goddamned smoke break," Goll replied.

"Uh, sure." He opened up his visor, then fished the pack and the Zippo out of his pocket, tapped two out, passed one to Goll.

"I never found out where you got that lighter from," Goll said around the cigarette after Kane had lit up. He lit his own, snapped it shut, and passed it to Goll.

"Had it custom-made when I became an ODST," Kane replied. "Figured, 'why not?' Cost about a hundred credits, but it's a really nice piece of work."

"It is," Goll agreed, holding it up, studying it intently. He passed it back and took a long pull on his cig as Kane pocketed it. "So...you and Hendrix," he said.

"What about us?" Kane replied, wondering where this was coming from.

"You two are together."

"Maybe. Diaz and Thompson were together."

"Don't worry, I'm obviously not going to throw the book at you. I don't give a shit." He frowned, fell into thought for a moment. "My father was a police officer, on Earth," he said. "He told me a lot of things, but something that really stuck was, 'You need to know when to apply the law, and when to apply common sense.' If I thought either you or Hendrix couldn't handle the relationship, I'd've thrown the book at you. I'm not an asshole, but I am a hardass. And with good reason. Same with Diaz and Thompson."

"I'm not sure it worked out too well for her," Kane muttered.

Goll's frown deepened. "Yeah. But she was...a little unstable. She'd been reprimanded before for rash actions. I think she would've done that for any of us." He shrugged. "Staring down the barrel of extinction, you don't really get to pick and choose who you get fighting beside you. We need all hands on deck for this war."

"Yeah," Kane said quietly, taking another long pull on his own Yeheyuan.

"And then there's this," Goll muttered, gesturing back into the dim interior of the bunker. "This whole damned mess. How are we going to explain any of this? Did ONI expect this? Did _anyone_ expect this crap?" He shook his head. "God, I'm tired." He finished off his cigarette, dropped it, and crushed it under his boot. "Let's get this over with."

"Seems we've been saying that a lot lately," Kane replied, doing the same. He lowered his visor and readjusted his grip on his shotgun.

"Yep."

The pair of ODSTs steeled themselves as they moved deeper into the bunker. The first minutes went by with a painful lethargy, apprehension and anxiety filling every room. They stuck together, moving slowly and cautiously through the derelict structure. There was hardly anything left, and it was difficult to determine what each room might have once been. Mostly they were just empty, dusty rooms of shadows and cobwebs. He wondered what had happened here, why it had been abandoned. It felt like an evil place.

Like something terrible had happened here.

Maybe that's why the Proxies were here. Maybe they were drawn to it. It was a good place for an ambush, since it was freaking him out. But they cleared the entire first floor and found nothing. The pair of them ended up at a descending stairwell. It was even darker down there. They would be underground, with no light sources but their own. With Proxies. Kane could feel his heart beginning to thump harder in his chest, but made himself relax. Or tried to. He was having a particularly difficult time with that right now.

They moved silently down the blackened stairwell, Kane leading with the way with the shotgun tucked tight against his shoulder, flashlight on, Goll watching their back. They hit the next floor and saw that it descended further still. Kane looked briefly down that next midnight stairwell and then led the way into the first of the subterranean floors. Both men kept silent, listening intently as they moved with military precision through the tomb-like environment. More dust-filled rooms, a few battered foldout tables and chairs, a handful of long-empty crates. Although Kane began to smell something as they moved through the rooms.

It was strong, acrid, very familiar.

Fuel. Old school liquid fuel. The scent was faint, but it had to be somewhere else in the bunker, probably lower. It must have gotten left behind, he figured as they pressed on. But this floor was just as vacant as the first one. So they headed deeper. Kane led the way again, moving down the next flight of stairs, and found that at least they terminated here, going no deeper. Kane tightened his grip on the shotgun, slipping his finger over the trigger. The Proxies had to be here. Waiting for them. Lurking in the darkness.

He stepped into the entryway of the final floor, playing his light across the bare instacrete walls. Door to the left and one to the right, also empty rectangles cut into the walls. They checked out the right room, finding a dead end, and moved over to the left doorway. It led to a larger corridor that extended off to the right. There were several more open doorways cut into the walls, moving towards the end of the passageway, where the only doors he'd seen so far in the whole building stood. And they were closed firmly.

"Has to be where they are," Kane muttered.

"More than likely, but they might be counting on us to think that. We'll check every room on the way there. Quick and quiet," Goll replied.

The adrenaline started to pound as they split up, each taking a side of the hallway. Kane peered into the first room, found nothing, and moved on. The seconds ticked by in tense silence, his flashlight's beam continuing to reveal more empty rooms. The fuel smell was getting stronger, and became overwhelming when he finally located its source. One of the rooms was home to a good twenty or so barrels of the stuff.

There was another room beyond it. Switching to his personal air supply, as the chemical reek was overwhelming, (he saw that at least two barrels were leaking), Kane moved through the room and checked out the single doorway at the back. Another empty room. He moved back to the hallway and helped Goll clear out the rest of the rooms. There was nothing and no one waiting for them. The pair came to stand at the end of the corridor.

"Grenades," Goll said.

Kane had just two left. He grabbed one of the fragmentation grenades and primed it as Goll did the same and opened the door. Both of them threw their grenades in and Goll hit the close button. The doors, which split down the middle to open, began to close again. Each man backed up against the wall to either side of the door, guns aimed and ready, and the whole area shook as twin explosions ruptured the room beyond.

Amid all that fiery, metal chaos, Kane felt a black bolt of frozen fear shoot through him as he saw two hands, clad in black armor, shoot through the opening in the door before it could finish closing, and begin to force it back open with brute strength.

"Oh crap," Goll muttered as they began backing away.

The doors were forced open and, wreathed in smoke and back-lit by fire, a horrifying visage of a familiar figure stepped out.

That nine-foot Elite was standing before them, no, towering over them, its eyes not just black but somehow _glowing_ black, a strange, hideous dead light staring out at them. Faster than either of them could follow, it reached out and snatched up Goll by the neck. Kane opened fire, but the huge Elite backhanded him with a casual ease and he was sent flying. He flew back several feet, hit the floor, and heard metal scraping as his momentum carried him several more feet. As he came to a stop, preparing to get up, he realized he was too late.

The giant Elite reached up, wrapped its hand around Goll's helmet, squeezed and pulled. The man didn't even get a chance to scream. A visceral torrent of blood sprayed the Elite, the Elites behind it that he now saw in the glare of his shotgun's flashlight, which was flickering madly, having landed some feet away. All of it horrifically shining in the flickering light. The enormous Elite Proxy dropped Goll's body and took a step towards him. Impossible fear filled him, because he was staring at death, at living death, coming straight for him, but on the heels of that came an idea, thrown together in a second.

Kane jumped to his feet and was off and running back down the corridor. The lead Elite Proxy roared, the sound echoing down the passageway and rattling his bones, and as he reached the door he was looking for, he spun around. God, all six of them were here and coming for him. This was going to have to be fast, and timed just right. The huge Elite Proxy was coming for him, sprinting down the corridor, roaring furiously. The others were close behind. Kane waited until the last second, then dashed into the fuel storage room.

He grabbed his final grenade, primed it, and, looking once over his shoulder and seeing the Elite Proxies into the room, dropped it, ran through the door at the back and threw himself out of the way. Hopefully, he wouldn't die-

The world went red.

Then the world went black.

* * *

" _Kane...zzt...please, I'm...zzt...ed some backup!"_

"Lara..."

Kane opened his eyes. Something was wrong with his vision...no, not his vision. His visor. It was cracked, in several places. His HUD was flickering badly. He couldn't hear anything, save for a broken transmission.

 _Lara_.

He sat up, then groaned. His entire body felt like a deep contusion. Looking down, he saw that his armor was cracked in several places as well, and pieces of it had been blown off. He looked around and saw a soot-covered corridor. How long had he been out? His radio crackled again. _"Kane, are you...zzt...hink it might be...zzt..."_

"Lara, I'm here," Kane said. "Lara, can you hear me?!"

Nothing. He must be too far underground, or maybe his radio was broken. Either way, he needed to get up and _move_ right now. Kane took a stumbling step forward, grunting as he fell against the wall, shoved himself upright and kept going. He stepped into the next room, where the fuel and the Elite Proxies had been, and saw...nothing but a lot more soot and charred pieces of what had been half a dozen Elite Proxies.

Well, if any of them had survived, he'd be dead now. He heard a soft hissing sound and it came to him, after a moment, what it was: his suit. Its atmospheric seal had been broken, and his personal air supply was still on. He'd forgotten to turn it off. It had probably saved him from suffocation. He switched it off, opened back up his vents.

The scent of fried flesh and burned meat filled his nostrils.

Kane limped through the room, almost fell out into the corridor, looked left, then right...his eyes fell on Goll's corpse.

"God," he whispered, then quickly limped over. He knelt, began patting the body down, taking everything he found. He finished the job by grabbing his dogtags. "I'm sorry," he said quietly, standing up and staring down one more time at the body. Well, without a head there was no way Goll would be coming back as a Proxy at least.

Kane suddenly felt his last meal coming up and fought to keep it down. God, just him and Lara now. Lara…

He turned limp-ran down the corridor, pausing to grab his shotgun and Goll's discarded SMG, and grunted, fighting agony as he hurried up the dark stairwell. It seemed to take forever, but he finally managed to come back out of the bunker.

"Lara! Can you hear me?!"

" _Kane! What happened?! Nevermind, I need backup. I think they're coming for me. A Proxy got into the base. I killed it, but the signals are getting closer."_

"I'm coming," Kane said, hauling himself into the Warthog and punching it. "Stay safe. It's just the two of us now."

" _What? What happened to Goll?"_ she asked.

"He didn't make it. Big Elite Proxy bastard took him down."

" _I'm sorry."_

"Me too. Stay safe."

" _Okay."_

He drove on, pushing the Warthog as hard as he could.

* * *

Kane managed to make it through the woods in what he thought of as record time, and yet he still felt every excruciating second. He told himself it was going to be okay, Lara was a more than capable fighter, not just an ODST but a badass one at that. But he just didn't believe it. They'd all been capable fighters, every single one of them, and still he and Lara were the only ones left. Everyone else in the entire region was dead.

He could still see Goll's headless corpse lying there in a pool of blood.

Trying to ignore that thought, ignore all the horrifying worry threatening to overwhelm him, Kane focused on just getting to the outpost. He came around the final curve in the road he'd found and the military outpost came into view. He also saw a pair of dark figures, both of them Elite-sized, heading for the entrance, and he gunned it. Kane grinned grimly as there was one hard thump, followed by another, and both of the inhuman bastards went flying. He slammed on the brakes after passing through the front gate and hopped out.

He grunted in pain as he landed on his bad leg, (the blast must have done something to his right knee, it hurt like hell), but kept going, SMG in hand. One of the Elite Proxies was stirring. He walked up, stuck his boot on its neck, and fired a burst into its head. He did the same to the other one, just to be sure, then started running into the base.

"Lara, I'm here! What's your status?!" He paused, listening. Nothing. "Lara?!" Still nothing. Fighting panic, he rushed through the outpost, boots echoing hollowly as he ran on. He came into the corridor he needed and saw another Proxy corpse half-in and half-out of the door leading to the command room.

"Lara?" he called, hurrying.

"Ash?"

There was something strange in her voice, some kind of almost wondrous terror. Kane stumbled into the control room, and froze.

Lara was standing in the middle of the room, facing away from him, looking up.

At the Slender Man.

"Lara," he whispered.

She looked over her shoulder at him, her face white with fear, eyes wide. "Ash-" she began, and then the Slender Man reached out, grabbed her, and they were both gone.

Kane was alone in the control room.

He might as well have been alone on the whole planet.


	20. Chapter 20: Alone

Kane wasn't sure how long he stood there, but at some point, something came down in his head, like a steel door slamming shut, like an emergency seal coming into place during an atmospheric breach. And just like that, everything seemed to snap into focus. He could feel his terror, his sense of loss, his almost suicidal hopelessness, his anger, but it was all at a distance, compartmentalized and hidden from sight for the moment. Right now, in this moment, there was only his responsibility, his job, his duty to stop this threat.

He was the last one.

The lone survivor, the only one capable of finishing it.

Kane turned his attention to the screen Lara had been monitoring the region from. He saw no more energy signatures around him. Moving in closer, he scrutinized the information. There were five energy sources left on the screen, not counting the huge energy signal pulsing near the center of the map. The portal. His destination. Although he didn't know if one of these signals was Lara or not yet. Don't think about it.

For a moment, he was stymied, unsure of how to get the information to himself to keep track of the signals, the Proxies, and where they were presently located, to hunt him down. But then he realized that it didn't matter, because they were now in the endgame. They were going to come to him, they were going to _have_ to, because he was now going to make his way to the Covenant camp and set the bombs and blow everything to hell.

And _hope_ that it would somehow work.

It wasn't like he had any alternatives.

Kane took one last look around the room, realized that Lara had left her SMG behind when she'd been...don't think about it. He knelt and grabbed the SMG, bringing it along, telling himself that it was for the extra firepower but knowing that it was because it was the only thing left that had once been hers. He turned and jogged out of the base, almost wishing that some of the Proxies would show up, because he could use an excuse to fight right now. But no, responsibilities. Emotions would come later, if at all.

As he reached the exit, Kane skidded to a halt. The Warthog was ruined, a huge hole smashed directly through the engine block, smoke drifting up and into the rainy night. Didn't matter. He ran around from the vehicle, across the asphalt, and through the security perimeter. He didn't even need a nav marker to help him find his destination. It was obvious now: a great, pulsing shaft of light that shot into the sky from somewhere ahead, like a malignant beacon. He could find his way there easily enough, and then he'd blow it all to hell.

One final time, Kane ran headlong into the dark forest.

* * *

The first attack came ten minutes into his run.

He heard the rustle of foliage somewhere above him right before he threw himself to the right. This one didn't scream. It was another Elite and it crashed into the ground like a force of nature. He raised his SMG and squeezed the trigger, rattling off rounds before it had a chance to take a step. For a couple of seconds, it went against the tide of bullets, but then he aimed up, into its face, and blew half of its head off, and it collapsed.

Kane reloaded, turned, and started running again.

There was nothing else in his head at the moment, or he tried to believe that, anyway. He felt that way, mostly. Still, distantly, he could feel his emotions, could feel the enormity of them, just barely begin to get the edges of his loss, his horror, his agony, but something was helping him keep focused, some survival trait that was fully aware of the fact that if he let it all come crashing down on him, there was a very, very good chance that he'd just put his pistol in his mouth and, as they said, 'fire and forget'.

And he just couldn't do it, not yet, not with so many lives riding on him.

So he ran on, sprinting through the forest, dodging around trees and leaping over fallen logs, pain in his leg be damned. His whole body was just pain, so much that it almost began to cancel itself out, becoming a background buzz that he could ignore. A wave of static rolled across what was left of his HUD and Kane looked around as he hurried on. Caught sight of the Slender Man, a ways off to his right, bigger now, and somehow glowing with a dark, dead light, and its tentacles...they were extending from its body, reaching out, ensnaring reality around it.

And then it was gone in a blink.

He ran on another thirty seconds, caught another roll of static, saw the Slender Man off to his left, closer this time.

It was coming for him.

The game was coming to a close, the endgame, everything else having led up to this confrontation. Kane had no idea if he could win, if winning was even a possibility, but he'd rather go down swinging, and would if he had anything to say about it.

A burst of static overrode his HUD and suddenly the Slender Man was there, in front of him, in all its awful malignant glory. Kane screamed in surprised fear and jerked to the right, dodging around it, and kept running.

 _Just keep running._

Because there was nothing else he could do, no other method of combat he could use. There was no stopping the Slender Man in conventional means, it was obvious now. In a way, he supposed, it had been obvious from that very first glimpse he'd caught of the tall, mysterious figure, standing atop the quarry, staring down at him with no eyes, briefly back-lit by a brilliant arc of lightning. He had been staring at death then.

And now it was chasing him.

A Proxy stepped out into his path, another human, and he blasted at it with his shotgun, shooting it right off its feet and not even bothering to slow down, to see if it was dead. He couldn't stop now. The light was brighter, closer. That awful, malevolent, cancerous light. What was it doing? What did it _want_? Kane no longer truly cared. He could feel the weight of his responsibility crushing down on him, hoping, praying to a God he knew didn't exist that he somehow had the strength to complete this task. Even if it meant his death.

At this point, he hoped it meant that.

The light was closer than ever now, and suddenly he was through the woods. The Slender Man was nowhere around, or at least nowhere within sight, perhaps still toying with him. Well, if that was the case, then he would take advantage of it. Kane could see the Covenant camp clearly now, the metal structures bathed in that dark purple light, which almost overwhelmed his vision. He kept going, almost there now, almost there-

A single figure stepped out of the doorway he had been intending to go through.

Kane skidded to a halt, immediately recognizing the figure.

"No, please..." he whispered, and his sanity slipped a notch, the dam of his willpower and endurance threatening to break open and unleash the full horror of his situation upon him as cracks began to appear. "Please, don't Lara..." he groaned.

The thing that had once been Lara snarled and charged for him. Her helmet was missing and he could clearly see her pale face and her black, flinty eyes, utterly devoid of humanity and kindness, the caring he had seen there before many times. There was only darkness now. And she was coming right for him.

"Lara, stop!" he begged.

He tried, once, to raise his gun, to defend himself, but he couldn't. He simply couldn't. The Proxy that had been Lara crashed into him like a truck and he was sent flying. She leaped on top of him and wrapped her hands around his helmet, picked it up and slammed it into the ground. An explosion of white-hot pain burst inside of his skull. She did it again, and again, and still he couldn't bring himself to fight back against her.

For a few lingering seconds, he wanted her to just end it.

To just kill him.

But something in him struggled, and fought back, and when he pulled out his pistol, put the barrel of it to her chin, and squeezed the trigger, it wasn't for him. It wasn't for the mission. It wasn't for anyone but Lara.

Because if she were somehow still alive in there, if there was even one iota of her personality, her being, her soul, still alive inside that hollow shell, then he knew she simply could not endure the horror of her body being used to kill Kane, to stop him from saving everyone else. And even if there was nothing left of her in there, if she was truly dead, (at that moment, he hoped she was for mercy's sake), then he owed to her, the memory of her, to do this. To see it through to the end. When the round punched through the Proxy's skull, it stopped moving immediately and fell forward onto him. Blood leaked onto his visor.

A little bit of it got in through the cracks and dripped onto his face.

Kane carefully rolled her body off of him, laid her on the ground, looked briefly at her. He realized that he was crying.

He hadn't cried in years.

But none of this mattered now. Kane struggled to his feet and stalked off, staring determinedly at the entrance. He knew exactly where he wanted to go. On his way in when he'd been captured, he'd seen a room packed with fusion coils. The fact that the base wasn't leveled was enough proof that they must still be there, still be intact. He got into the base and began moving through the wrecked, derelict interior, lurching silently through the haunted corridors. Death had been visited onto this place, and something worse, and he could feel it on the air itself.

Some kind of almost psychic toxicity, something that could not be experienced by any of the traditional senses, but could be sensed nonetheless, perhaps by the soul, or the psyche. It was heavy on the air, smothering almost, the whole base covered in it. Kane took a right, passed through some kind of control room, followed another corridor to its end, and finally found what he was looking for. And he was correct.

They were still there, still intact.

Not for long.

He planted every last explosive he'd pulled out of Ross's suit, glad that he hadn't used them. It didn't feel like enough and actually planting and priming them barely took a minute, but it would have to be enough. He looked at the dozens of fusion coils, humming and pulsing gently. It would at least be enough to destroy this base.

Pulling out the detonator, he almost just punched it.

It would be a pretty painless way to go.

But no. Not yet. He had to see, he had to _know_ , one way or the other. So he turned and retraced his steps, his boots echoing hollowly off the walls of the Covenant base. He thought it might be the loneliest sound he'd ever heard. As he stepped back outside, he saw that it was raining harder than ever now, pouring down.

Kane began jogging across the clearing, making for the treeline.

His HUD turned to static and he jerked to a halt, turned left, found himself staring up at the Slender Man itself, looming over him, pulsing with anger, positively radiating it, some kind of alien malevolence.

Kane didn't say anything, he simply raised the detonator, practically shoving in the Slender Man's lack of a face.

And pushed the button.

* * *

Voices in the darkness.

Kane could hear voices, but where was he? And what were they saying? Was he dead? God, he hoped so. Then again, he'd always been under the impression, (and had hoped), that there would just be nothing after death, that he would simply cease to be. So maybe he wasn't dead. And it wasn't so dark anymore, but gray.

And the voices were getting louder, clearer.

"He's still alive. God."

"Get his helmet off."

"His leg's definitely broken."

Grayer now, lighter, brighter. Kane felt pain pulsing through him. He tried to move, felt a wave of agony roll through him.

On the verge of passing out again.

But he had to see, to _know_.

Kane opened his eyes.

"Oh shit, he's awake."

He saw a face hovering over him, a bald man, frowning in deep concentration. "Don't worry," he said, "we've got you."

"Make way! Move!" Another voice, this one familiar. And then another face appeared over him. It was the Captain of the _Winter's Edge_. He was crouching down, and haloing his lined face was clear blue sky.

Kane reached up, gripped his collar. "Did I do it?" he croaked. "Is it dead?"

"You did it," the Captain replied, making no move to disengage from Kane. "I'm afraid you're the only survivor, Corporal Kane, but you did it. Whatever it was you did worked. The energy signals, all of them, are gone. There's no trace of them. Someone from ONI has shown up, and they're going to want to ask you a lot of questions, but I told him he could wait."

Kane was nodding, and let his hand fall away. "We did it," he whispered.

And the world faded to black one more time.


End file.
